>> My Manufacturing Process Modeling database (VFP3.0) uses hundreds of
>> megabytes of disk space and my clients wish it didn't.
>>
>> I noticed that my pkzip utility can reduce the size of a DBF by up to
>90%.
>> Can I infer that the DBF format is inherently inefficient with data
>storage
>> ?
>
>VFP tables are just ASCII files with a header so this explains both the
>size and compression ratio
>however some of your space problems can be solved with data normalization
>which can save a lot of empty
>space (there is a nice simple example in Colin's page)
>
>as for compressing and decompressing files I wouldn't recommend this as it
>will impact performance
>you can use a product like ZIp Folders which make ZIP file totaly
>transparent to the system (ie you can use a file in a zip as if it was in a
>regular directroy) etc.
>
>Arnon

Arnon:

Thank you for your response. This will help me tell my client to give up the idea of trying to compress the data files every time the VFP program is closed.