An nice feature come back with Firebird 2.1, we can put databases on rawdevice

You can use this feature under all Posix platform

Under Linux, your device is something like /dev/hdb6, under MacOsX it is something like /dev/rdisk2s3 To manage this, the best way is to to create a special node for this

for example my raw device is /dev/hdb6

# ls -l /dev/hdb6

You will see something like:

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 70 Feb  9  2006 /dev/hdb6
^                      ^^^^^ - this are major and minor of special file
|
+--------- This letter 'b' means it's block device.
           Therefore first mknod parameter is 'b'.

So I create a new special node for /dev/hdb6 at any point of myfilesystem.

Let it for example be /var/firebird/db.

cd /var/firebird/dbmknod hdb6 b 3 70chown firebird:firebird hdb6chmod 0660 hdb6 Now test it: db # ls -ltotal 0brw-rw---- 1 firebird firebird 3, 70 Feb 15 10:27 hdb6 Now I can restore my backup db file on this raw device

gbak -c mybackup.fbk localhost:/var/firebird/db/hdb6 -user MYUSER-password mypass and then after use it as all others databases.

PS Thanks Alex for your help