Deleting tracking information

A feature of the tracking system that might not be evident is that tracking information for all versions of a table, and thus for its whole lifespan, is still kept when the corresponding table is dropped. The reason is to keep the history information intact should we happen to create a table with the same name later on.

Let us do a copy of the author table (refer to Chapter 9 if needed), and name it author_copy. We then activate tracking on this new table. The last operation is to drop this author_copy table. Even if we no longer see it in the normal list of tables, it's different in the Tracking panel for database marc_book.

At this point we can go back in time, sort of, and see the tracking report and snapshot for the versions of this deleted table. If we really want to remove all evidence of the table ever having existed, then we can use the Drop link to destroy the tracking data also (after clicking on OK in the subsequent confirmation panel).