SNIP

David,

Here's one viewpoint for you:

>
>So my questions go to anyone out there who rely on VFP for reasonably complex/dynamic datasets upon which a business relies.
>
>How often do you routinely maintain your data by physically rebuilding it?
>

While this depends on the individual application, my answer would be HARDLY EVER! On the other hand, backups are done REGULARLY.

>What operational factors govern your choice of how often you perform such maintenance?
>

Tables getting near 2-gig size limit; bloat of .FPT (and more rarely .CDX); excess of deleted records which truly are physically deleteable.

>Are there any well-known pitfalls that victimize novices vis-a-vis database maintenance when converting from a stand-alone to a shared access envirnoment.
>

I'll leave this to others who may have a much "fresher" experience to relate.

In summary, assuming good hardware, good user practises (like not powering off without clean shutdown of both the application(s) and Windows), programming which conforms to recommendations about a 'shared environment' in the VFP guide(s) and capable network administration, all should be well.

Cheers,

Jim N


>It seemed to me like this would be a good topic for a knowledge base article, but I couldn't find one. A pointer to a technical article that addresses these issues would really be helpful.