Walter,

Like Jon, I have never really done any testing of the speed of having DELETED() tag vs. not having. But you make a very interesting point about whether table has deleted records or not. What it means is that if I drop DELETED() tag and a customer has speed problem, they can pack the table, which should make the DELETED() tag unnecessary.

The reason I started looking at this index tag is I was looking for a way to reduce number of index tags in one of the tables. The table has up to 300,000 records (and will grow to a million). It already has 15 index tags and I need to add another one, on Char field of 25 char length. I was/am concerned that this size table with so many tags (16), may slow things down a lot of cause table corruption.

Thank you very much for your suggestion.


>Dmitry,
>
>A very dangerous action. In general if you don't have many deleted records. the DELETED() tag only slows things down. If you've got large tables accessed over a WAN, the DELETED() tag can slow your queries down to a crawl.
>
>The hackers guide is incomplete or plain misleading. If you've got performance problems, the please try to delete those tag and check if the situation has improved. In general there is no need at all to use them.
>
>Walter,
>
>
>>For years, I have used an index tag on expression DELETED(). I don't remember, but think, at one point I read somewhere that having tag on DELTED() helps speeding the queries. This might have been when I was still using Clipper (before I moved to VFP), I don't remember.
>>
>>My question is, does it really help?
>>
>>Thank you.