Svein Erling Tysvar wrote:
... on our production server one hour ago ...
internal gds software consistency check (missing pointer page in DPM_data_pages (243))
After restarting the server where Firebird runs things seem to behave normally again. But what does the error message actually mean? We expect the source of the error to be the deletion of a table (that particular table was not used by anyone).
Ann W.Harrison answers:
Pointer pages contain an array of page numbers of data pages for a specific table.
Data pages are located through a two stage lookup based on decomposing part of a record's db_key. The db_key has four components, the last three of which are some times called the record number. The first part is the relation id. The second is the sequence number of a pointer page for the table. The third is the offset on the pointer page of the data page number. The last part is the offset on the data page of the index entry for the record on the page.
Pointer pages are located through the RDB$PAGES table: that table contains the page number and sequence number of pointer pages for every table - along with transaction inventory pages, index root pages, and generator pages. Each pointer page also contains the page number of the next pointer page for that table.
One of those lookups got a wrong answer. The most common reason for failure to locate a pointer page in Firebird 1.x is that the table so many records that the decomposition algorithm rolled over - the number of rows varies with the compressed record size, but it is on the order of 600,000,000 for records compress to 100 bytes exclusive of blobs. Firebird 2 (and Vulcan) use a larger part of the db_key for the record number.
I don't know of another bug that causes that error - there could be some, especially if you've just dropped a table.
If I were you, I'd backup and restore the database, using the verbose switch and checking the number of records per table. If you've got tables with more than 600,000,000 records, they should probably be split and recreated as views using a union.