Restoring Page Size Options

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InterBase supports database page sizes of 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and 16384 bytes. The default is 4096 bytes. To change the page size, back up the database and then restore it, modifying the Page Size option in the Database Restore dialog.

Changing the page size can improve performance for the following reasons:

• Storing and retrieving Blob data is most efficient when the entire Blob fits on a single database page. If an application stores many Blobs exceeding 4KB, using a larger page size reduces the time for accessing Blob data.
• InterBase performs better if rows do not span pages. If a database contains long rows of data, consider increasing the page size.
• If a database has a large index, increasing the database page size reduces the number of levels in the index tree. Indexes work faster if their depth is kept to a minimum. Choose Database|Maintenance|Database Statistics to display index statistics, and consider increasing the page size if index depth is greater than three on any frequently used index.
• If most transactions involve only a few rows of data, a smaller page size may be appropriate, because less data needs to be passed back and forth and less memory is used by the disk cache.

This function corresponds to the -page_size option of gbak.