System Maintenance > Packing Tables

System, Pack...

There are four options on the System, Pack menu. The first three will pack all the tables of each of the three datasets. The fourth is for packing the System tables which DonorQuest uses to store non-donor information, such as report layouts, user-specific preferences, etc.

Packing is the act of physically removing deleted records from a database file. When you delete information in DonorQuest (specific donations, pledges, or entire donor accounts, etc.), DonorQuest will simply mark the records as deleted. All records marked as deleted are ignored by DonorQuest, so it's as if they aren't there, but physically they are still taking up space in their respective table. The reason DonorQuest uses this "marking" technique is to make deletions quick and easy. If DonorQuest were to physically remove the record you want to delete from the database, it would take too much time to "shuffle" the surrounding records in the database to reclaim the space. This practice also makes possible the restoration of accidentally deleted donor records using the Donor, Restore A Deleted Donor feature. It also enables the Donor, Undo Consolidation To Donor feature. It's a bit like the Recycle bin in Windows which holds deleted files until it is emptied.

But there comes a time when you've "marked" so many donor records as deleted that you're beginning to waste quite a bit of space and reducing performance by storing these records which aren't supposed to exist anymore. How quickly this happens depends on how often you delete donors, but users can typically go for a year or more before worrying about it. The Packing options will do the necessary data "shuffling" to reclaim the space used by records marked as deleted. This is like emptying the Recycle bin in Windows. To see the percent of records of each DonorQuest table which have been marked as deleted, click on Reports, Database Status. Generally when about a third of the records in a table have been marked as deleted, it's time to do a pack.

Warning: You MUST back up all of your donor data immediately prior to doing a PACK on the Donor or Archive datasets. This will ensure that you are able to recover from a power failure or other system problem if one should occur during the pack. When DonorQuest is Packing a dataset, it must NOT be disturbed for any reason. If there is a power failure, or the computer is shut off or rebooted, the dataset being packed will be damage, and must be restored from backup. You must also be the only user logged into DonorQuest to initiate a pack. Once you pack the Donor dataset, you will not be able to restore any mistakenly deleted donor records which were deleted prior to the pack. Nor will you be able to undo any past donor consolidations. So choose a time of low activity for your organization, when minimal changes to the database have been made recently to do a pack.