Introduction To External Maintenance

An external maintenance is the process of running Collect!'s maintenance procedures on the database without having to physically sign into Collect!.

This method allows your technicians to streamline the maintenance procedures. Although the internal maintenance procedures may also be altered, the external maintenance procedures are more adaptable for the serious technician with a more complex setup.

We have some clients whose technicians have set up their external maintenance routines to begin at scheduled times and to automatically send the maintenance logs to an email address. This is all controlled through batch files, event schedulers and other operating system features that your technicians may have at their disposal.

You can access the external maintenance functions either through your operating system's prompt or command feature or through your Program group dialog. Choose one of Collect!'s preset batch files for running Fix or Rebuild utilities.

To take advantage of optimizing maintenance for your particular setup, you need to know about batch files, as well as reading up on the more technical topics of the database engine and how it works with your data.

The internal maintenance procedures are more than adequate to keep your database in good repair. As your data set grows larger, or perhaps your network setup becomes more sophisticated, it is nice to know that you have alternatives when running maintenance to fine tune the process to meet your specific demands.

See Also

- Database Maintenance - External
- Database Maintenance Topics