Dennis -- in addition to the info others have provided, let me add one thing. Although I don't see it very often anymore, I've worked on systems that "recycle" used records. In other words, any INSERTs or APPENDs actually search for a deleted record to recall/update, and will only insert if no deleted records are found.

This will help lessen the number of "dead records" in your tables, though it comes with a price -- the need to search for a deleted record prior to adding new data. This price is lessened if you have an index on deleted() and can seek for a deleted record, but still....

Just though I would mention it, if your goal is to lessen the number of deleted records without having to PACK. I worked on a system a few years ago where data were imported, and, frequently, after the import, the user would check his/her reports and decided to delete the entire import-run and start again with a corrected file. This meant that this table frequently had two or three times as many deleted records as non-deleted. In this particular case, import speed was not an issue, but disk space was (this was a few years ago, in a shop where the network guys were hesistant to spend another couple of hundred on more storage, and political turf battles were begin to heat up). Ultimately, we rewrote the process with a more elegant solution, but the recycle-record approach really helped us for a few months while we finished the rewrite.


>I was just wondering why foxpro marks records for deletion rather than physically deleting the records.
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>I know you can pack the tables to permanantely remove them. Is there a way to tell it to physically remove them vs marking them?
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>Since it's just marking them, is there a way of undeleting them?
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>tks...