On 2 Apr 2004 at 12:12, Jonathan Neve wrote:

>Or else, what might be good would be something like a shadow file, in
>which, all obselete record versions are dumped, as and when they become
>obselete.

Size of such file may be rather big...

>Please, no flammes if this is yet another horrendous idea! :-)

No, I'm not going to flame, just to tell you one fable how Oracle
beat me. :-)
I support an Oracle database. A field in a table used to be in
upper case, but not constrained to. One day manager told me: "Hey, we
have some wrong records in the table. Names must be all in upper
case." My experience in Oracle is next to nothing, so (as any other
FB user) I issued a simple query: "UPDATE A_TABLE SET A_FIELD =
UPPER(A_FIELD)"...
Yeah, you are free to laugh... It took me a couple of minutes to
put my jaw back and some more time to find a workaround because
Oracle told me that his rollback segments were full.

SY, Dimitry Sibiryakov.