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It is a great concept. I think CNC's more experienced with Tools Releases older than 8.96 do it by habit and comfort. Personally, I refuse to do full gens!
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Hold up there cowboy! there's more to it than that. Partial gens work as long as your environment is conducive to building update packages. Update packages are effective in smaller environments where there is not a lot of development (or in a large environment with extreme change control management).
When you scale things up to a big shop, like the one I work at, you have lots of ongoing development, lots of developers, developers in mutiple locations. My environment supports five countries, with developers and appleads scattered over four time zones. Our practice (on XE, and down the road on 9.0) is to build full packages. This way I sweep ALL of the development changes into the package. That being said, I still build update packages for requests that can't wait until the next round of package builds. My developers don't have to worry about forgetting to tell me about a project that they are working on, forcing me to build a special package.
Jeff's blog idea of swapping tables is the way that we will go down the road.
Gregg "old guy" Larkin