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FairCom DB is able to dump a stack trace into a file during a self-initiated shutdown by taking advantage of a system utility, pstack. This new feature adds a similar capability for the Windows operating system by creating a mini-dump containing information about the stack trace.
The stack is dumped into a file named stack<pid>_<lognum>.mdmp (under Solaris the name is pstack<pid>_<lognum>.txt). Visual Studio 7.0 is required to inspect the file for Windows stack dumps. It is also suggested to enable Dr. Watson on the Windows system of interest when attempting to generate a dump file with information needed to trace a continuing FairCom DB stack dump.
This feature requires an external DLL, dbghelp.dll, which is part of the Windows installation, and is dynamically loaded at stack dump time. It also requires that this DLL exports the function MiniDumpWriteDump() which may not be the case with older versions of this DLL. In the case where the DLL cannot be found or it does not contain the function, the stack dump fails and a message is logged in CTSTATUS.FCS without any other consequence.
FairCom DB for AIX 5.2 and later now also supports a process stack trace when a fatal error occurs. FairCom DB uses the AIX procstack utility to log the stack trace to the file procstack_<pid>_<sernum>.log, where pid is the FairCom DB process ID and sernum is an ever-increasing number (starting at 1).
