Data is missing from records in my v5.5 Maximizer database.
Does anyone have helpful ideas about it (below) ?
Some of the user defined fields (UDFs) for many records have vanished!
This has concerned me a few times this year for isolated records but
lately over 100 affected records have been found. A study of nightly
tape backups shows the data existed prior to a database 'rebuild' but
not afterwards.
The 'rebuild' occurred because Maximizer came up with a message
indicating an error code (#2 I think it was) on one of the data
files - and MultiActive's knowledge base advised doing a database
backup & restore operation. (Which I did.)
Timing of the previous data losses seems to correlate with rebuilds
as well. So it seems that the culprit is either the backup & restore
process, or else the problem/s that caused the error message.
I'm using MaxExchange (v5.5), and have done rebuilds only on the
superpeer (where the problems have occurred), not on the remote sites.
The remote sites are not missing the UDF data. So I can use them to
see which data is missing - but unfortunately only for the records
that I actually know have a problem. I'm thinking of doing a database
difference operation somehow, but it seems messy. Anyone got a good
tool for that?
The problem that triggered the need for a rebuild might have arisen
from me using the ODBC link to Maximizer data, from inside MS-Access.
I didn't do anything drastic with it at all, but the database came up
with an error on one (or maybe two) occasions when I was using that
link. Are there any known problems with using the v5.5 ODBC link from
Maxi to MS-Access ?
Or generally with the database backup/restore operation?
My database is fairly old (4-5 years) and was converted from version
1.2 to version 5.5, about 2 years ago, using Maximizer's menu
options. One possibility is that the database has some corruption in
it, and consequently the problem will continue occurring. Are there
any good tools out there for identifying database corruptions (and/or
fixing them) ?
I need to determine exactly what's missing, repair it, and prevent
the problem from re-occurring. Someone suggested dumping the database
to text, then manually rebuilding it, so as to remove the suspected
corruption. That sounds scary though, since I don't imagine it to
completely retain the current contents. Plus there'd be a lot of down-
time.
Can anyone help?
Thank you,
Andrew Greenhill.
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