Re: How to reduce SE .dat & .idx file sizes?

In article <6i1rcn$hrg@nntpb.cb.lucent.com>, rseebach@lucent.com wrote: > > > Warning: Alter Table may be dangerous to your application !! > > Our application used to use the Alter Table trick to compress large tables; > the tables are so large that the operation takes as long as an hour. > > If an Alter Table operaiton is cancelled while it is in progress, > due to operation cancellation or machine going down, the database > is left in a corrupted state, and support people have to manually > massage the system catalogues. > > The corruption is due to the way Informix implements Alter Table. > Specifically, a new table is created, with some of its attributes > going into the system catalogues, but not all. For example, the tabname > field is left blank. If the Alter Table is aborted, this blank field > in the systables system catalogue screws up processing for other > Informix processes. > > We have gone to unload/drop table/create table/reload to avoid this mess. > Agreed. We had recently installed a patched SE 7.23 (because I live in a SCO world) and we encountered a network receive error during an alter table. I was eventually able to fix the system catalogs, but it required some radical surgery. John Prideaux alastl@ctnet.net -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading