PACKDISK packs cylinders for tables in the currently defined Ferret scope. For more information on the scope of Ferret commands, see SCOPE.
Packing applies to cylinders, not to the space in individual data blocks within those cylinders. Data block sizes remain the same after the PACKDISK operation.
Vantage can isolate some file system errors to a specific data or index subtable, or to a contiguous range of rows ("region") in a data or index subtable, it marks only the affected subtable or region down. This improves system performance and availability by allowing transactions that do not require access to the down subtable or rows to proceed, without causing a database failure that requires a system restart.
If PACKDISK encounters down regions, it skips these regions, and displays the percentage of total space that was skipped.
The Ferret INQUIRE (or INQ) and ABORT commands can be used to check on the progress or halt this operation during command execution.