At 09:59 AM 27/04/2004 +0200, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
> > I've seen many post regarding using sweep and other maintenance tools
> > in FB. Being new to this I have no idea what tool does what and why
> > you would use them. Could someone please give a description of what
> > one should do regularly with FB and what effects they have?
>
>Regularly? Nothing, actually. As far as I know, there's no real need
>for a sweep if you keep your transactions short and the transaction
>counters moving forward.

That's part of the story. The other part is that sweeping is the only way
(apart from an actual restore) that will free space that was occupied by
deleted rows.
If transactions are moving forward nicely, an automatic sweep will never
happen. Thus, it's a Good Thing (TM) to 'uck out the dead wood from time
to time and kill off all those delete stumps. It helps to keep performance
up, since it reduces the level of page indirection. Fewer page reads
===better performance.

People who delete lots of rows regularly (and I'm one, since I do
"permanent temporary tables" and spring-clean them when they get a bit big)
need to put sweeping in the diary.

/heLen