Due to the nature of some database design, under some critical circumstances a database may become corrupted and will no longer be accessible to the operator. This happens very rarely but steps must be taken to ensure a mission critical application such as Empress is able to recover should such a catastrophic event occur. Due to this nature, Empress Master is designed to perform a database repair and compact (to both repair and conserve space with the database) every time the program is started. For this task to be performed however, exclusive use must be available. That is, no other user can have any of the Empress programs open prior to the server computer opening Empress Master. If Empress Master is unable to obtain exclusive use of the database, the database maintenance is not performed.

The database repair and compact can be performed as many times as the program is opened with exclusive use of the database. Each time this is performed, the database may be observed to decrease in size until an absolute compact state is reached. This is not necessary as most circumstances a single repair and compact would normally be sufficient.

NOTE: This is only recommended for Microsoft Access database configurations.
Users of SQL Server or MSDE do not require this procedure