<<What Steve may be confus about is: what happens if I *SERIALLY* read the detail dataset...in what order will I find A, B, and C?>> I agree that there's some confusion, but have other ideas about the location of same ;-) <<BTW, a serial repack with Adager preserves serial relativity (ooohh...a new phrase!) as well as chronology.>> Fine; but Adager/DBGENERAL/whatever do not in any way constitute the entire universe of available methods to repack a data set. A perfectly legitimate, albeit naive, way to get the set back "in order" is to read the set, write it out to a file, empty the set, then read it back in from the file. Presumably the read would be done in some sorted order that makes sense to the user, such as to group records with the same values in a particular field together. What happens to the chronological sequence of non-sorted paths under this transformation? If there is a properly-constructed sort item on each chain that the user wants to remain in chronological sequence, not a thing. If there is no such sort item, I think it's pretty safe to say that the integrity of the chronological sequencing of those paths will be negatively impacted. <<The only thing I can see happening that might have led to Steve's incorrect statement(s) is this:>> Remind me again; which of my statements were "incorrect"? Steve