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time requred to pack

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    time requred to pack

    I have a table with 6 simple fields (all under 20 chars) and containing approx 2.5M records. I need it to eventually contain about 20M records. Either I am doing something wrong or I've hit a threshold. I tried to delete records (just a few, maybe 200) and am finding that the pack operation can take many minutes, perhaps even hours. There are two simple indexes. I can live with the slow index rebuilding, but the pack operation is unbearably slow. I am hesitant to pursue it further and may switch to UNIX MySQL bacause of the pack times. I seem to have the resources to deal with such a beast in this machine. Can anyone point out anything could be wrong?

    Tom Lyon

    #2
    RE: time requred to pack

    Tom,

    I have some tables that take a long time to pack and reindex, but I attribute that to file sizes rather than record counts. My largest table has just over two million records, but the file size is 150 meg.

    It can take up to twenty minutes to pack (across the network) but I think we need to remember the safeguards that Alpha has built into the program. In my experience Alpha builds a temporary table as the pack progresses and if the pack is successful, it then writes that temporary table over the original. thus if the operation were to fail due to some corruption, or power interruption, or network interruption, the original is intact.

    When you start talking about creating and then rewriting files of this size, I can understand the delay.

    Hope this helps.
    There can be only one.

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      #3
      RE: time requred to pack

      Tom,
      My guess is that 20 million recs is way beyond the what the Alpha designers had in mind for their present engine. What is happening that you have to run packs and reindexes? Is it problems or attempts to avoid problems. Is this table a highly volatile table? I would think that you could put something in your design that would allow you to do something other than delete records. It certainly depends on what the table is used for, but there might be a way to keep these two operations to a minimum. Ira recently described ways to append records into a large table without rebuilding all indexes ( Keep another instance of that table open while appending and Alpha will build the indexes on the fly ( one by one ). I believe this holds true for update and post operations. Is this happening on a network? If so it might be quicker to move the table to a fast local machine and do the pack on it. As a test you might write anothe 2.5 million records with a program and see how it functions with double the records. Good luck.
      John





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        #4
        RE: time requred to pack

        File access time is good on this large database. It's populated (finally!) with 3.8 million records. The database size is 192MB. Keyfield operations go just as quickly as any other table I use. The problem is going to be in updating indexes and packing, which, luckily, I can script to perform during the night. Development of such a beast is exceedingly unbearable, I must admit. I'm satisfied with the normal operation of such a large file, but if it was to be edited on a regular basis, I believe it would be useless. To its credit, Alpha Five *did* outperform the UNIX server running MySQL. That surprised me. Guess I'll give Alpha Five a 'good' rating despite some annoyances encountered. I'm told that only big-ticket databases, such as Oracle, are capable of handling such massive tables.

        Tom Lyon

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