>>Hi all,
>>
>>I post this mainly because it appears that many people believe that use of the REINDEX command causes CDX "bloat".
>>
>>I know that I have always believed so until Evan D. noticed that SP3 seemd to have a much faster REINDEX and such was confirmed by MS. At that time I wondered if that might have affected the known bloat effect, reasoning that doing all indexes in 1 pass means that all of the TAGS would be in storage at the same time and so the process might then be able to overwrite the CDX from its beginning.
>>
>>I finally tried this out yesterday and, sure enough, there was absolutely NO CDX BLOAT even after 5 REINDEX commands (closing the subject table each time in between).
>>
>>Knowing no better I attribute this to SP3.
>>
>>. . .but is that really the source of this observation. . .
>>
>>The only other FoxPro that I have on a machine is a FPD 2.6 (probably 2.6b). I made an adjustment to change 2 of the indexes from type I to type N and repeated the test there.
>>
>>To my great surprise there was NO CDX BLOAT there either!!!
>>
>
>Hey Jim,
>
>Maybe I have a misunderstanding of how CDX bloat would occur (in the past, of course), but I don't think it happened just because a file was reindexed several times. It seems like it would more likely occur in the following scenario:
>
>lots records added & deleted, not in any predefined pattern
>reindex
>more records added, different ones deleted, etc...
>reindex
>
>Testing that on an old version would take a little more effort.

Hi Steve,

There's no doubt that what you describe is correct, but I also understood that (the old) REINDEX would do a TAG at a time, essentially placing the data for the new index for a TAG at the end of the CDX and changing pointers (or invalidating original TAG entry or whatever) as required.

But after the simple test with FPD I really have no idea anymore.

Cheers,
JimN