Firebird database with more than 2^32 transactions

1 May 2020 1 mins Firebird

Firebird 3 added support for transaction ID to go over, originally, 2³¹ and later 2³², all the way up to the 2⁴⁸. Although a great improvement it might become a problem if the client library can’t properly handle that in a few places where these numbers are surfaced.

Because I needed to try this with FirebirdClient too, I needed such database. There isn’t much room for shortcuts (to be really sure it’s a valid database), rather the machine needs to do the work. It took a while to get over 2³², which I suppose would be limit most people are interested in. The database I’m providing here (and also archiving it for me in case I need to revisit some code 😃) has Next transaction at 7_595_278_038 aka 3_300_310_742 over the 2³². It’s not a backup of database, but the database file itself, simply because doing backup & restore resets the transaction counter.

Hope it speeds up some of your testing.

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.