> We are considering moving our systems to GCE and trying to figure the best > approach to backup our many firebird databases. > Firebird is not VSS aware so we can't use shadow copying.
Not completely true. 1- Firebird uses careful write order, so a VSS snapshot should be a valid database image -- though with pages containing uncommitted data. So, which FB is not VSS aware, it co-exists with VSS quite nicely. 2- You can use nbackup to create a logical DB snapshot, which would be equivalent of a VSS snapshot. > On our current > host, we create backups of every single database with gbak daily - which > consumes a lot of time and disk. We would like to improve that. > Would the following procedure be enough to guarantee a safe differential > backup? We are on windows : > 1. connect to all databases and set them to backup mode (or offline mode) > 2. stop the firebird service > 3. unmount the drive containing the dbs > 4. create a snapshot with gcloud > 5. remount, restart service, put dbs online Please clarify. 1- Are you moving your databases to run on GCE? 2- Looking to store backups on gcloud? 3- Both? If 1 or 3 you need to perform some disk benchmarking. Unlike some databases, Firebird performance is significantly influenced by IO _latency_. All clouds talk about provisioning IOPS, but few talk about what the latency is of each IOP. You can get 10,000 IOPS if you have 10,000 processes each generated 1 IOPS, Firebird is (largely) a single process. I know that there are differences between cloud provider (don't have first hand experience with GCE -- hoping soon) Sean
