At 06:39 PM 4/26/00 -0700, David Berg wrote:

>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.'

Ill-informed as you might expect.

>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.

Oh, wow!

>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.

God knows what he meant, but I think the information behind his
statement was more like your second theory than your first.

>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)?

Interbase's indexes are automatically rebalanced as data changes.

>Do we need index rebuild facilities in Interbase?

Activate/Deactivate index work on an active database, but are not
necessary.

> Or can we market it as more reliable than Oracle!!!

As long as the lion is asleep, lets not poke him.

Ann