MLS Corrupt Database

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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jander04
New Member
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 6:37 pm
Location: Phoenix, Arizona

MLS Corrupt Database

#1

Post by jander04 »

I was excited to find this forum. It looks like it will be a great help. I am a stake clerk, and MLS always instructs the user to contact the stake clerk when there is an error. However, I know of no resource to get help other than to call or email church headquarters. Quite often the help is needed now and not later.

I had an experience this past week which I think can be of help to the users of MLS that I will share.

We have a large stake of almost 6000 members and 12 units. The MLS database has become corrupted several times over the past few months. The problem with the corruption of the database is that you don’t know it is corrupted until you back up and nothing actually gets written to disk. During the backup process, you see the dialog boxes pop up and indication that the backup is taking place, but check the disk, and nothing will be written. This happened again this past week.

When I restored the last backup and tried to do a send and receive changes, I got the following error:

"An Error Has Occurred" with a frowning face.

I tried rebooting and reinstalling MLS 2.6.2, but the error never cleared. I called church headquarters, and they suggested uninstalling and reinstalling MLS.

The following is the process I went through:

1. Go to the control panel, select Add/Remove programs and uninstall MLS. The process got hung up when removing the registry entries (church headquarters had seen this before).

2. Reinstall MLS 2.6.2.

3. Remove it again. This time it removed completely.

4. Erase the following directories:

c:\program files\lds church (I would suggest you copy the units directory to another location before erasing just in case...)
c:\program files\jre (if there)
c:\program files\jre6 (this could be jre5)
c:\afaria

5. Reinstall MLS again.

6. Run MLS. You will have to fill in a unit name and a temporary password. It doesn’t matter what you put here because it will be overwritten when you restore the database.

7. Run MLS again, and log on as the temporary user you set up.

8. From the File menu, select Restore from and File

9. Restore the database.

After I did this, the problem I was having was gone. I also noticed that the database was much smaller than it was before. Here are the differences:

1. The file size of mls_idx0.data file was reduced from 117,315 KB to 21,691 KB.

2. The size of the mlsdata directory was reduced from 141 MB to 48.3 MB.

Before doing this, MLS seemed, as times, almost unusably slow. Just logging on could take minutes. Now MLS seems MUCH faster. I think the database was clogged with old data that wasn’t being used, and starting from a scratch cleaned out the junk.

Jerry Anderson
russellhltn
Community Administrator
Posts: 34417
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 2:53 pm
Location: U.S.

#2

Post by russellhltn »

The old MIS/FIS programs had a rebuild function in them. MLS does not. However, restoring the database forces the system to rebuild the indexes. I suspect the file you mentioned is in index file. The restore take far longer then the backup. So if you've never done a restore before and it seems to be taking a long time - don't worry.
jander04
New Member
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 6:37 pm
Location: Phoenix, Arizona

#3

Post by jander04 »

RussellHltn wrote:The old MIS/FIS programs had a rebuild function in them. MLS does not. However, restoring the database forces the system to rebuild the indexes. I suspect the file you mentioned is in index file. The restore take far longer then the backup. So if you've never done a restore before and it seems to be taking a long time - don't worry.


The restore into the old database we have been working from the beginning took about 20 minute. The restore to a virgin database took about 30 seconds. I was amazed at the difference. I remember the old MIS rebuild function. I used it several time. I wish MLS had a similar function.

I am sure you are right about the index file. Apparently it had never been completely rebuilt since we installed MLS.

Jerry
russellhltn
Community Administrator
Posts: 34417
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 2:53 pm
Location: U.S.

#4

Post by russellhltn »

Jander04 wrote:The restore into the old database we have been working from the beginning took about 20 minute. The restore to a virgin database took about 30 seconds.
Well, I don't think it's too hard to create a virgin database. Just remove everything in the Units directory. However, I'm not sure what will happen without cleaning out other things like Aferia.
billv-p40
New Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:42 am

rename instead of remove directory

#5

Post by billv-p40 »

Instead of removing the units directory, it might be a good idea to rename it until you're sure everything has been properly restored. Also along the lines of a database going bad, I'm sure customer support would be interested in any unusual circumstances which might have led up to the database going bad. I.e. power outage, hard booting the computer, killing the mls application instead of exiting...

Another suggestion is if the database goes bad, try a media scan on the hard drive and make sure you don't have some bad clusters on the hard disk.
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