Deleted Records

[dabowles]

Hi,
This is probably an automatic "NO" question, but, is there anyway to find out when a record was deleted, or who may have deleted a record or records, keeping in mind that the mdb hasn't been compacted so the "junk" is still inside the database. Is there anyway possible, without getting down to the bit level, to possibly extract any type of information, even the time the record was deleted would be nice. I have no type of security implemented in the mdb, everyone logs on with Admin, and it is running on a Novell Netware 5 server. Is there anyway possible the Netware 5 server would have recorded somewhere what user may have "shrunk" the size of the mdb?

Thanks,
David Bowles

 

[DCCoolBreeze]

You are right. There is not way to determine who and when the record was deleted.

 

[BNPMike]

I don't know for certain but I suspect deleted records can be overwritten before compaction. Most likely they are 'marked' as deleted but put on a free space list so that if a thread wants to add a new record to that page Jet will first look for any deleted records before moving to the end of the used-space list.

The reason I suspect this is that it is a simple way of getting efficiency - you avoid adding new space at the end of the database plus you don't have to do another i/o to get there. Win-win situation.

What percentage of deleted records are re-used depends on the pattern of your update activity ie to what extent insertions are occurring on the same page as deletions. mike.stephens@bnpparibas.com