While many utilities for OpenEdge are available online, there are still some utilities that require you to shut down the database prior to running them. For these utilities, limiting the amount of information per area reduces the amount of downtime needed for the utility to run.

The best example of this is an index rebuild. If you only need to rebuild one index, you still must scan the entire area where the records for that index are stored to ensure you have a pointer to every record. If all of your tables are in one area, this can take a significant amount of time. It is much faster to scan an area where all the records are from one table.