Cindy,

>Why do you feel it is necessary to permanently get rid of records? Are your tables that large that you MUST re-use records?
>
>I've seen too many ng posts where the motivation behind this was a misunderstanding of the concept and proper use of a primary key.

From a technical point of view it is possible that the VFP-team enhances the DBF tables in such manner that deleted records are reused, so the need for packing tables would be greatly reduced. In general we would like to get rid of deleted records because they take up space, and reqiures new records to be appended at the end of the file, so increasing the risk of defragmentation of tables. So I'd say that recycling records is generally good for performance and uptime reasons.

Walter,