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1991-12-16
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38 lines
Surprise! Your disk is just as crowded after you delete
records from a Q&A data base as before. For instance, I had
an employee information data base named PERSON with 440
records in it. A directory listing showed a 675K DTF file
and a 343K IDX file. After using Q&A's File Remove command
to remove all but 20 of the entries, as far as DOS was
concerned I still had nearly 1MB tied up in those files.
To remedy this problem, copy the contents of your old data
files to new ones, then rename the new ones: After deleting
a large number of records, select File Copy Copy design with
IA info from the Q&A main menu, and call your new files
something like PERSON2. Next, select File Copy Copy selected
forms. Press <F10> twice to copy all the nondeleted records
in the data base; the new DTF and IDX files will be
considerably smaller. You may now use DOS to delete the
original files and rename the new ones.
Emmett A. Dulaney
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Editor's note: Q&A isn't the only Symantec product with this
problem. No matter how many headlines and documents you
delete from a ThinkTank outline file, it stays at the
largest size it's ever been. The solution for ThinkTank is
similar to the one for Q&A: Write the contents to a file (in
ThinkTank's case, a "structured" file), then create a new
data base, and read the data back in using the Port Text
Receive Wordprocessor command. Other products, such as
Borland's Reflex, pack their data bases on command, making
these measures unnecessary.
Title: Slim Down Your Q&A Files
Category: DBS
Issue date: Aug 1991
Editor: Brett Glass
Supplementary files: NONE