At 07:19 AM 28/04/2007, you wrote:

>Hello,
>
>My question is if its possible to somehow shred deleted records making
>them impossible to recover.

My question is what evidence do you have that it is possible to
recover deleted records from a Firebird database. :-)

I'm not really trying to be a smartass...but usually we get the
opposite question: is it really impossible to retrieve records that
were deleted by mistake? (It is! well, nearly....There are complex
tools and procedures in very expert hands that may be able to
identify and recover *some* recently-deleted data if the database has
been taken off-line immediately the mistake occurred).

The main thing that makes retrieving deleted records between
"difficult" and "impossible" is the fact that Firebird doesn't store
table data in physical tables at all (c.f. Access, MySQL,
MSSQLServer, DBISAM, etc., which do literally maintain physical files
within internally controlled directory structures...find the files
and you've found the tables, indexes, etc. These products often have
"undelete" tools that can be used by chimpanzees.)

In Firebird and InterBase, once a delete is committed the deleted
record version is marked for garbage collection. At that point those
experts with their abstruse tools have a chance of getting inside the
database file and sifting through the garbage in the hope of finding
something. The worse the application code, the better the
chances. If you have nice clean application code that doesn't leave
obsolete record versions around, the normal course of events for
deleted records is sudden death by decapitation...that is, they are
replaced by a stub which will disappear next time you do a sweep.
After that, the physical space where the record was before is just a
campsite waiting for new tenants.

Of course, if you do a backup and restore, even the empty space is
gone. Back versions and stubs are not backed up.

./heLen