Alan McDonald wrote:

> there is never a need to "pack" your data...

Alan, forgive me, but there is no need to restate what has been said
over the years many times. I get your position that you just cannot
fathom a use case where this is needed.

But I also get the fact that people want to do this and have been
requesting it repeatedly for years. I fully understand the position of
someone who finds they both cannot take their database offline for this
maintenance but are also out of disk space and need to reclaim some
space from the database files. It is similar to situations I have faced
where I just didn't have the resources to do the obvious and no one
would help except by repeatedly saying "do the obvious!"

Frankly, I don't need to know why they are in this situation. I only
need to hear that they say they cannot find a comfortable way out of it
and that having a way for the database server to return space to the
host OS would be really, really helpful. For these people to repeatedly
hear that their problem isn't really a serious problem is not only
discouraging for them but downright insulting the way it has sometimes
been stated by our community.

So, like I said, our community does not consider this important enough
to change and I expect only sponsorship will bring it about.

--
Doug C.
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