Delete Update Behavior of the SSEv Engine

Can someone on the team tell me if a delete or update orphans a row in the SQL Server Everywhere database that must be compacted out to free the space? I understand that Compact runs automatically when the last connection is closed but does this create another copy of the database as it does with JET or is this an update-in-place. Is this an opportunity to corrupt the database if the process is interrupted by power-failure or a truck running over the device from right-to-left?

Hmm..I think there is some misunderstanding here. When the last connection to database is closed COMPAT IS NOT RUN automatically. There is a similar thing called 'Auto Shrink' that runs if the space available (and sparse) is more than a threshold. COMPACT need to be run explicitly. When you run COMPACT, you can specify the destination database. The destination database can also be same as the source database file. In any case, the compaction first happens into a temp database file, the original file deleted, the temp files gets renamed.

Thanks,

Laxmi