>>Why invest a great deal of time and effort, and needlessly increase the fragility of the file system, trying to avoid some probably beneficial periodic file reorganization, from using a scheme that's going to break the instant you stop using the native file system? Falls in the same category of reasoning that explains how smart we were in accepting a file system that we knew would break if we ever had a hard drive bigger than 768MB. Or how 640K was more memory than anyone would ever need!
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Hey Ed,
>You're very strict :) Periodic organization of tables have many advantages but till that period comes I'm not opposing the idea of using deleted records. It's just changing a byte and not much different from updating any other data.
>(My brain still seems to be intact:)
I am very strict, because not all of my systems are based on VFP native tables, in which case, the entire concept of 'record recycling' is invalid. There are issues of recoverability of deleted values, and far greater possible performance issues that arise from a file that would otherwise be organized in a natural order based on the historical arrival of data in the system, and which would automagically get significant boosts just from simple defragmentation of the file where the logical order of access followed the natural order of the data file. This is especailly the case on (excuse my bias) low-end systems using a FAT partition to host their data files, where forward sequential reference is optimized, and jumping around in a file is expensive. That's probably a bigger performance issue than copying the data fresh sans deletions to get rid of deleted records, at the same time ensuring the data file is written in an optimized natural order and rebuilding indexes from scratch to eliminate index bloat when the system would otherwise be idle.
If you think I'm strict about this, just ask people at my office (well, the ones who are still alive at least) what happens when they fail to make adequate backups! ;-)
