Validating Your Database

The Firebird database software includes a feature for checking that the database is not damaged. This does not in any way check whether you have entered correct data. It is rather checking for the sort of damage to files that can happen if your turn off your computer while the program is in the middle of updating the database. (Obviously, I would strongly advise against doing that!)

To do this check, just run Database à Validate. When it is done, it will give the message "The database validation did not find any problems" if that was the case, and will display the errors if there are problems found. If any errors are found, please email the displayed errors to technical support for assistance.

There is probably no reason to run this option unless something very strange is happening. In that case, the program may not even start successfully, in which case you will not be able to run this option from the menu anyway! In that case, contact me for technical support.

Only a user on the computer that has the Network Server version installed on it can validate the database. Users of the Network Client version will receive a message explaining that they cannot do the validation.

There have only been ever been a handful of cases (out of over 4,000 users!) that I can recall where a user has informed me of a validation error in their Firebird database, so as you can see, this is a very rare problem. In that case, it turned out that it was very easy to fix the problem. The user restored their latest backup database, checked the validation again, and it was fine.

•	Be clear on where your most recent database backup is. (Call this "Backup A".)

•	Make another backup, with Backup/Restore à Backup Database, being sure not to overwrite that previous backup. I.e. either store it in a different place,or with a different filename. (Call this "Backup B".)

•	Restore Backup B, that you just made, with Backup/Restore à Restore Database.

•	Check the validation, with Database à Validate. If it's OK now, you are done.

•	If it's still not OK, and Backup A isn't too old (so you are willing to redo all data entry since that backup was made), restore Backup A with Backup/Restore à Restore Database.

•	Check the validation, with Database à Validate. If it's OK now, you will just have to re-do any data entry since that backup was made.

You should probably also continue checking the validation periodically, to make sure whatever problem you originally had doesn't recur.

If the above steps didn't work, or Backup A was so old that you really didn't want to go back to it, please contact technical support, and email Backup B to us as an attachment, so we can look at it and see whether we can fix it in some other ways. It is entirely likely that we will not be able to do this, though, so this is another reason to be sure to backup regularly!