I was talking to an Oracle rep today who mentioned that 'all databases
(except RDB) have indexes that get out of sync and must be rebuilt
periodically.' He then went on to talk about a new feature in Oracle that
allows indexes to be rebuilt while the database is still in use.

While I found the feature interesting, I was amazed at the statement. I
can't imagine a database allowing an index to 'get out of sync', because to
me that means queries that use that index won't be reliable. I truely hope
that he just meant that the indexes get slow/fragmented and need to be
rebuilt.

Does anyone know if this is true (for Oracle or others)? Does Interbase
suffer from such problems: fragmentation or inaccuracy (given it's history,
I would expect that it works more like RDB)? Do we need index rebuild
facilities in Interbase? Or can we market it as more reliable than
Oracle!!!

Thanks,

Dave