The technical term "getting of out sync" I think is a "red-herring". I
think what was being discussed is the fact that indexes get "out of
balance" or change their selectivity, meaning their storage is NOT
always optimized for speed.

This was true of earlier version of IB, but was addressed in v5.?
through the introduction of self-optimizing indexes.

IB has, since v4 (at least), provided a mechanism to force the system to
rebuild the index information (ALTER INDEX INACTIVE, followed by ALTER
INDEX ACTIVE). This could be performed while the system was in use.

It seems that Oracle is just catching up to IB.


Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: David Berg [mailto:DaveBerg@...]
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 9:39 PM
To: IB-Architect@egroups.com
Subject: [IB-Architect] Index Sync/Rebuild Question

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




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