Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

500,000 KB vs. 20,000 KB 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

BubbaJean

IS-IT--Management
Jun 5, 2002
111
US
I was given a Access 2000 database and at the time, the KB was around 20,000. Now its up to 500,000 KB, what causes this and is it dangerous??
 
If you are only adding data, it should not grow that much. Are you compacting the db each time it is closed? If you don't, that can cause the bloating.
Since you are using Access 2000, go to Tools >Options. On the second tab, on the bottom left side there should be a box to check that will automatically compact on close.

HTH

An investment in knowledge always pays the best dividends.
by Benjamin Franklin
 
It's caused by the fact that Access does no housekeeping until you do a Compact on the database. That is, deleted records aren't deleted ... just marked as deleted and do not display. Similarly, other changes to the database may just hide information but don't physically remove it.

Is it dangerous? ... a moderate growth is to be expected and this wasted space can cause processing delays. Bloated databases seem much more prone to corruption than those that are regularly maintained. I would say that growth from 20 MB to 500 MB (2500% !!) is a bit much and you should be looking at a regular backup and compact cycle for the database.
 
Every time you create a database object, Access allocates more hard drive space, and your MDB grows. When you delete objects, however, the MDB size stays the same.

The actual process isn't as clear cut as what I've stated above, but that's what it boils down to. 'Compact' the database, and your size will shrink, sometimes dramatically.

Either way, you can expect your Access database won't fit on a floppy if you add any number of queries, forms, reports, etc.
 
Just a word of warning regarding compacting. Apart from the defragmentation of the database, compacting will reset any deleted autonumber values, where new records have not been subsequently created.
For iunstance, some users may use a temp table to generate an autonumber, and periodically flush out these records. If you compact when this table has no records, then the next number produced by the autonumber fields will be '1' instead of the expected (say) '34526'. This of course would be bad database design, but I've yet to see the perfect database!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top