This is a rather complex question. To understand how Check Links works one needs to step back a bit into the history of Microsoft Dynamics GP.

In its origins, Dynamics GP was conceived with the idea of running on multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Novell Netware), and "database" platforms, namely Ctree and Btrieve. The term database is a misnomer because in reality Ctree and Btrieve at the time were nothing more than Index Sequential Access Method (ISAM)-based file systems, with Btrieve being at best a record manager environment that could run on Netware and Windows. However, ISAM-based systems lacked referential integrity capabilities.

This brings me to Microsoft Dexterity -- the Microsoft Dynamics GP development environment. Within a Dexterity application, such as Dynamics GP, developers can define table structures and relationships that the Dexterity Runtime Engine then replicates into physical files depending on the file system platform. This table replication could be controlled via the DEX.INI file, with the FileHandler key.

FileHandler = Ctree

Since ISAM file systems had no ability to support referential integrity, the Dynamics development team had to create their own routines to analyze and maintain data integrity. The routines that were put into place were Shrink, Rebuild, Check Links, and Reconcile. In fact, back in the 80's and 90's if you called Great Plains Technical Support, the first thing you were always asked to do was to run a Shrink-Rebuild-Check Links-Reconcile.

The Shrink operation would remove any blank spaces between records, which was very common in ISAM-based platforms. Since ISAM files lacked the ability to compress files, records removed from GP's physical files would create logical gaps in the file itself, hence space was never released.

NOTE: Btrieve was modularized starting with version 6.15 and became one of two database backends that plugged into a standard software interface called the Micro-Kernel Database Engine. The other product is Scalable SQL, a…