Hey There,
When I first started to read about Fragmentation in an article on the iNotes4You blog, I originally thought the author was going to talk about data storage fragmentation. Data storage fragmentation is where you have data stored all over the place on a hard drive or other memory device. Especially on a hard drive it can cause performance problems when reading or writing your important information.
For example, Tap Forms uses the SQLite database engine to provide a way of storing and retrieving all your information. When you delete any data from Tap Forms, the database file size does not shrink to reduce the amount of space consumed for storing less data. This is a feature of SQLite which allows you to re-use space that was previously assigned to other data. But this can result in storage fragmentation causing different bits of information to be grouped with other non-related bits of information thus causing performance to drop. The performance drop is caused because your hard drive has to hunt all over the place for your data when you ask for it.
To work around this problem, Tap Forms provides some database maintenance utilities built-in. The main command which will reduce the file size of your Tap Forms database is called Vacuum. Tapping on that will in most cases reclaim space for you by compacting the database into a smaller file. What the SQLite engine is doing during a vacuum is actually creating a new file and copying the data to it from the old file. The old file gets deleted automatically after a successful vacuum operation.
However, having said all of this, what Thomas at the iNotes4You Blog was referring to is what I would call Data Fragmentation. You have many sources for your data in many different apps that you need to launch in order to get access to various bits of information that you need to help you with your day. This is an area where Tap Forms can be a great help. With Tap Forms you can keep everything all in one place.
Thomas has a lot more information about this which you may find interesting. So go on over to the iNotes4You blog and have a read:
http://inotes4you.com/2014/05/05/fragmentation-tap-forms/
Thanks!
Brendan