Wednesday, March 23, 2011

no_garbage_collect

You do not know what is that? Well, InterBase and Firebird allow specifying connection parameter that will disable garbage collection by statements in this connection.
This is the same as the option -g for gbak. And, of course, all other connections without this parameter will continue to try collecting garbage in the database, if any.

This connection option mostly is not known, because standard and "closed source" drivers usually does not produce access to server-specific features. Thus, you may use this option only for IBX (IBExpress components in Delphi and C++Builder), FIBPlus, and some other "direct access" components. ODBC, dbExpress? No, of course.

But, why you may ever need this option?
Sometimes you may want to run huge report that will scan lot of data. And, at the moment this report will run, there may be lot of garbage record versions in the database. So, your report connection will collect garbage (especially if you use Firebird Classic), and report will run much slower than it could be.
In this case, before running the report, you may set no_garbage_collect option, and report will be fast as a rocket.

I also knew some small applications with small databases (up to 1gb), that used no_garbage_collect option for all connections. This way garbage is not collected at all, and during the day size of database could grow 2 or 3 times. But, each day database was scheduled to backup and restore, so, why to care about garbage?

Since I do not see needs to do backup and restore each day, I do not recommend disabling garbage collection this way. Use it only for specific connection, if you ever need to do this at all.

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