🚀 go-pugleaf

I write a utility in Delphi 7 that inserts a bunch of records into a
temporary local IB 6020 database table.  I do this repeatedly for a
bunch of files that I have to upload.  The type of file that has to be
uploaded is not simple.  A bunch of calculations have to be performed
on each line, then an INSERT() can be made.  For safety reasons, I
always switch on forced writes and I commit every insert.

Before loading the next file's worth of INSERT()'s I delete the
contents of the entire temp table.

Of course, this makes the database grow, a lot.  I need to control
this growth.  It grows a little over a meg each file I load, and I
have thousands of files to load, so, database growth must be
controlled.

I did an experiment where I a) Deleted all the previous records, b)
Did a sweep using IBConsole, c) loaded the next file.  Result: The
database grew by about a meg, as usual.  I thought a sweep was
supposed to free up garbage records left over from a delete, so that
new INSERT()s could use that space and *not* grow the database file
any further.

What am I doing wrong, and how can I control this database growth to
about 5MB max?  (I have Sweep interval set at the default 20,000)

The reason I'm using IB for this temp table is that it provides me
with all the power and flexibility of SQL, which I need. (Versus using
a "dumb" text file or a TClientDataSet in memory, etc.)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.