Start Server in Background utility (dbspawn)

Starts a database server in the background.

Syntax
dbspawn [ options ] server-command
Option Description
@data

Read in options from the specified environment variable or configuration file. If both exist with the same name, the environment variable is used. The Start Server in Background utility (dbspawn) does not expand the contents of configuration files specified with the @data option. See Using configuration files.

If you want to protect passwords or other information in the configuration file, you can use the File Hiding utility to obfuscate the contents of the configuration file. See File Hiding utility (dbfhide).

-f

Force dbspawn to start a database server, even if a default database server already exists. If a database server is running but is not the default, dbspawn starts another server.

If a database server is already running with the same name as the database server that dbspawn is attempting to start, dbspawn returns success without starting a new server.

-p

Specify the operating system process ID of the database server process. For example:

dbspawn -p dbeng11 -n newserver

reports a message of the following form to a command prompt:

New process ID is 306
-q Run in quiet mode—messages are not displayed.
server-command

Specify the command line for starting the database server. See The SQL Anywhere database server.

Remarks

The dbspawn utility is provided to start a server in the background. dbspawn starts the server in the background and returns with an exit code of 0 (success) or non-zero (failure). If a database server is already running on the same computer, dbspawn does not start the new server and reports failure. Otherwise, dbspawn does not return until the database server has completed initialization and is ready to accept requests.

For more information about exit codes, see Software component exit codes.

The dbspawn utility is useful for starting a server from a batch file, especially when subsequent commands in the batch file require a server that is accepting requests.

If the specified path includes at least one space, you must enclose the path in one set of double quotes. For example,

dbspawn dbeng11 "c:\my databases\mysalesdata.db"

If the specified path does not contain spaces, then quotes are not required.