>A customer has bloat on an fpt that is in near constant use. I've gone over the code to see where I might be adding in too much date, removed some fields etc. but still it run towards the 2Gb limit. I can pack the file at night time, generally after midnight but not my favourite thing to do.
>Can somone tell me what pack does please, I've read the online and help stuff but it doesn't make sense to what I see and my testing.
>Is there any way to reduce the size of the fpt while users are in the system?
>In a test area I have a dbf of 120mb and related ftp of 850Mb.
>If I use the select command from this file into a new dbf the fpt reduces to 50mb, this is the same is deleted is set on or off.
>If I use the copy to command from this file into a new dbf the fpt reduces to 50mb, this is the same is deleted is set on or off.
>I then tried to select into a cursor and loop through the original file replacing the 3 memo fields with the cursor version, using a variable. The FPT got bigger. I also tried replacing the memo field with a blank first but it still got bigger. I removed the variable element and did a direct replace from the cursor.memo1 to the file, again the file got bigger.
>Finally I used the file that I selected into where the fpt was reduced 50mb and did a replace into the original file. The FPT got bigger.
>~M

(1) Pack does two things
(a) Permantly deletes the records that have been deleted
(b) reduces the memos (fpt)

(2) Replacing the contents of a memo field allocates a new block

(3) It may be worthwhile to set its blocksize to 1 byte rather than the default of 64 bytes - which allocates 64 bytes even for a memo field of 1 byte

as follows

= AlterBlockSize('TableName', 0)

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function	AlterBlockSize(_table, n)

	local OldBlockSize, location
	OldBlockSize = set('BlockSize')

	use (m._table) excl in 0
	location = fullpath(dbf(m._table))
	location = addbs(JustPath(m.Location)) + JustStem(m.location)
	
	
	set blocksize to m.n
	alter table (m._table) add x123456 L default .f. NOVALIDATE
	alter table (m._table) drop x123456 NOVALIDATE
	use in (m._Table)
	
	set BlockSize to (m.OldBlockSize)
	
	delete file (m.location + '.BAK')
	delete file (m.location + '.TBK')

endfunc
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