>
> >
> > How often do they do a gbak and restore?
> >
>
> Is it not enough just to do a sweep every nigth to have the
> transactions cleaned up ?
>

I've always thought of "sweep" as the servers rather rude way to clean up
when you force dirty applications on it for some time or you fail to do some
standard maintenance on the database in a routine, timely fashion.

I disable sweep (it maybe a left over from vesion 5.5 when sweep was broken)
but i check the server stats from time to time. If the application is clean
and the computers running it are stable, then sweep may never be called
anyway, even if it's set at 5,000.

I do a backup and restore about every six months. This is after what I call
good, healthy, moderately heavy user traffic by up to 15-20 clients 8 hours
a day 5 days a week on a database of about 250Mb. I might even overlook a
restore til 8 or 9 months.

> > >Could the size of the table (~1M recs) significantly affect the
> speed of
> > >returning records read by index?
> >
> > It could. How often do they run SET STATS to rebalance the indexes?
>
> Is this something that should be done every once in a while ?
> What does it do
>

I have an adminstrative button in my app which rebuilds the indexes. I can
set it off when I like. I have never really noticed a difference in app
performance after such a rebuild.
If you have the correct indexes already, it will perform well. I was running
one application for about 2 years. We did an upgrade - both hardware and
software and I rebuilt the database (not completely). After installing all
the new stuff, It was noticeably faster - everyone was pleased. Then one day
about 3 months later, I was poking around and noticed that an index I was
used to seeing wasn't there (my fault). One index on one table. I put it
in.. and boy did it make a difference. I was asked by the users what had
happened. they all noticed. They never notice when I rebuild the indexes.


Alan