Is this DBC just for transient tables, meaning you drop and recreate all tables each time? How about just deleting the DBC and DBF files and recreating the whole thing from scratch?

GenDBC should be of help here.

>My whole thing (maybe it will help someone else out there do something one day):
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>I have a decent-sized VBScript that I am executing nightly with cscript.exe. It uses MSXML4 to talk to the SQLXML provider behind a firewall, pulling in XML which I then convert to a local VFP DBC. The routine is:
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> 1. Using a SQLXML template, get the table/column info from the Information_Schema.Columns table on MSSQL. This comes back as XML via the SQLXML ISAPI filter.
> 2. For each node that comes back, parse the XML string containing MSSQL column types into appropriate VFP types and parse the MSSQL table name to a legal/liveable VFP name.
> 3. Create a VFP table in the local DBC with the new name.
> 4. Drop the existing VFP table
> 5. Run a series of ALTER TABLE commands to create a new VFP table.
> 6. Using a SQLXML template, retrieve the MSSQL table as an XML document (breaking it into 1000-row result sets for known large tables to keep mem/CPU usage low)
> 7. Parse each XML node into an Insert-SQL statement, doing an insert for each row.
> 8. Index certain columns of the result VFP table.
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>This is for an app server where constant lookup table querying is done. In the previous version of the app, the web server went to MSSQL with ADO/OLEDB for every lookup. This was slow and not all that secure since COM needs a lot of open ports on a firewall. So instead, the the SQL-Select can be done against a VFP DBC on the local filesystem (there's nothing faster or more scalable). The lookup time for the lookups has dropped from 20-70 seconds (variance due to other architecture issues) to 1.
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>Anyway, it's step 4 that is bloating up the DBC. It seems like every time I drop a table the deleted() mark gets put in there. And with 25 lookup tables done every day, the DBC is bloating up fast. I was thinking that I might create a seperate script (to run weekly) to copy the DBC/DCT/DCX to a DBF/FPT/CDX and then connect to the temp DBF with the OLEDB driver and issue a PACK and then copy the files back over the originals. But I'm not sure I can do that with OLEDB. I wish I could just PACK DATABASE but it doesn' look to be that easy....
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>Comments welcome!