SNIP
>
>Such it is here. Taking advantage of an undocumented feature goes against the rules. You don't know when or if the feature will change.
Okay, George, I'll finally bite at your feeble attempt at ridicule. You've a way to go yet before you can make sarcasm work for you like the recent other thread here. A very long way!
You see, George, there are more things UNdocumented than not in VFP that we all have come to rely on. This is no different at all in that respect than any of those others.
But it is different in one important respect - both Hacker's for 6 and Hacker's for 7 state unequivocally that REINDEX does not remove "bloat" from .CDX files. In their case they specifically mention space used 'by former indexes'.
Now that
is wrong!!! And many people here rely on Hacker's more than they do on the VFP documentation itself [I don't need a lecture that such is a stupid thing to do - people do do it. period].
Now FP2.6 and VFP6SP5, the only 2 prior versions where I had tried my simple REINDEX test, BOTH showed that the .CDX tables were reduced in size by a REINDEX when that .CDX contained (node?) entries that were no longer 'active' as a result of subsequent records added.
And here is a quote by DavidF from thread #
523073 message #
523415 "
A lesser bloat is caused by B+ tree fragmentation caused by the normal insertion of records. I don't recall when the REINDEX command started recovering deleted tag space. I don't think it did back in FP2.x. It does in VFP5 and VFP6 which are the only versions I have on this machine.".
So I simply reported it as a problem when I found otherwise with VFP7SP1.
By the way, when this was the subject of a clearly titled thread way back I didn't see you cautioning anyone then about relying on this "undocumented feature".
We learned that .CDX files are now (way) "fatter" in VFP7SP1 than they have been in previous versions of FP/VFP. This too is undocumented. That's alright with you I guess.
On learning that I reran my old REINDEX test and found that it, too, was now different than in prior versions of FP/VFP. I reported that for anyone who might be interested and I called it a bug because I believe it to be so. My guess is that the person who first reported the fatter .CDX files called that a bug too. My guess is that the two are tightly related.
Got it?!?!?!?!
