| Are you ready?
This is not a trivial question. More than 50% companies do not have recovery plan. The most awful thing which can happen with an IT is a corporate system failure and continuous downtime, and one of the most dangerous reasons of downtime is a database corruption. Corruption can lead to the loss of important data and even loose the business records. Your IT department or technical support team should always be ready to recognize data corruption and neutralize it as soon as possible. The main goal of "fire-fighting" of data corruption is to save as much data as possible and reduce the downtime of the database. There is no need to tell about lost data - everyone knows the importance of corporate data. And every minute of unscheduled downtime costs your business a lot of money and you might be loosing clients while IT specialists try to locate the reason, estimate losses and repair the database. Using InterBase or Firebird databases you usually cannot expect that something awful will happen. But "usually" is not the word that is sufficient to your boss when something did happen, right? Also, if you have a lot of clients' installations and cannot be sure that all clients make backups and keep their hardware properly serviced, you certainly can expect corrupted clients databases from time to time, and it will be important for your business to help clients solve these issues as soon as possible.
Important! License explanation: to fix clients' databases you need to have Tech Support/Site version . Personal version is for internal use only. If your customer asks to fix his database you (as vendor) need to buy Tech Support/Site License to support him, or your customer need to buy its own Personal version. We allow the significant discount for upgrade from Personal/Ambulance (all versions) to Tech Support/Site 2.0 version for our existing customers (contact us for discount offer: support@ib-aid.com).
Fire-fighting with FBFirstAID and IBFirstAID
IBFirstAID allows to quickly fix a lot of corruptions, save remained (after corruption) data and reduce losses of data and time. Also we should mention that IBFirstAID/FBFirstAID is “after corruption” medicine. To prevent corruptions and be able to face them even in the most difficult cases we recommend to use our products IBDataGuard and FBDataGuard.
Errors to be fixed with IBFirstAID/FBFirstAID
A free version that is downloadable allows you to diagnose potential problems with your database and there is also a commercial version that allows you to fix the problems that are found. The diagnostic features allow you to check a database's validity. Whilst the fully featured version is capable of fixing a number of common database corruption problems. IBFirstAID uses its own database access layer to connect to analyze and repair a Firebird or InterBase database. There are a number of possible corruptions that IBFirstAID has been designed to repair and correct. These are listed below:
- Internal gds software consistency check (cannot find tip page (165)) The required Transaction Inventory Page is corrupt and the database cannot be opened. It is expected in this instance that neither gbak nor gfix will be able to repair your database (except in the case of a Read Only database). IBFirstAID will repair the missing pages and recover the database. · Unknown database I/O error for file "*.gdb" Error while trying to read from the database file. This usually indicates that a number of database pages have probably been lost at the end of the database file (power failure?). In this instance the database cannot be opened. Gfix cannot repair this. IBFirstAID will recreate the missing system pages and deletes the wrong pointers.
- Database file appears corrupt. Wrong page type. Page NNN is of wrong type (expected X, found Y) This error can indicate a number of problems. But typically there are missing pages in the database, or the page that is being accessed is not the expected page type. For example, if the expected page type is 5, it can mean that some data may have been corrupted within a table. Such a corruption may prevent a sucessful backup backup or may make the table unavailable to the database. IBFirstAID fixes the wrong page pointers and repairs the database.
- Wrong record length. Cannot find backversion. IBFirstAID will check every record in database and will try and repair these record-level errors.
- Other database corruptions can be caused by lost pages.
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