About Repairing Tables

What is repairing?

Choosing the Repair Tables option does one additional step before going on to do a rebuild indexes. It trawls through the tables and validates all the records as much as possible. If it finds errors where possible the record is repaired and if not the record is deleted. Any records that have previously been marked for deletion are also deleted at this stage. This results in a smaller data file than before.

The resulting table is written to a new file whilst it is being compiled. When it is complete the names are swapped so that the new table has the original file name and the replaced table is given a .sav file extension. There are now effectively two copies of the table. Once you have tested the repaired database and are happy, you can delete all the .sav files.

After the new table is in place the system goes on to perform a normal rebuild of the indexes.

When should you repair a table?

There are three reasons why you might want to repair a table.

Why should you repair?

You should repair a table because:

How do you repair?

The steps are exactly as for doing a ‘Rebuild Index’ but selecting the 'Repair Table' option instead.

See also...

About Rebuilding Indexes

Re-indexing & Repairing EXACT Data

Logging the Rebuild and Repairs

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Logging the Rebuild and Repairs