To Much Data

[matethreat]

Hello all,

This isn't a probem yet, but I can see it becoming one in the future.

I have 2 tables that collect information from employees. One table collect the time they arrive at work, leave at lunch, back from lunch and leave at the end of the day.

The other table collect the times they spend on jobs throughout the day.

What I am worried about is that with 70 employees in reasonably short order the amount of information being stored will be immense and my file size for the database will get out of hand. I am not really sure how to handle this problem. I was thinking I could move the old information to another table in another database, and just link it to the opperational database. The only thing that I have noticed, and I am not sure if I am loosing the plot is that you can remove as much information as you like from your database, but it doesn't reduce the file size.

Very Strange, any advice on alternate solutions or why the file size is staying the same after the removal of information would be appreciated.

G'Day From down under

 

[Edski]

G'Day Mate,
On the file size not decreasing, you'll need to compact the database to recover any unused space. From the menu, Tools, Database Utilities > Compact and Repair Database...

Gee I'd hate to work at your place if all that information is being stored about me!

Cheers mate.

 

[BNPMike]

From what you are saying you might get about 100,000 rows per annum. Lets say each timekeeping record is 100 bytes. That is only 10MB per annum. Jet can go to 2000 Mb and can comfortable process 1 million rows as long as you don't have 6 joins and 37 SQL look-ups on form. So perhaps you don't need to worry about size just yet.

Incidentally why are you deleting data?

 

[matethreat]

I haven't actually removed any information, and I would prefer not to. I noticed that the file sizes didn't decrease on old versions of the database when I removed information to see what kind of difference it made in the size of the file.

Currently from that information I am gathering I am creating several other tables with calulated information. I am currently working on a plan of eliminating those tables and using queries instead. But, that may be sometime away, as there are always a million other things happening. Currently my database grows about 400Kb a day.

So, with 2000Mb of storage I have 13 years to make my fixes, that shouldn't be a worry. It will be much sooner though.

I will also take a look at the database fix when I get back to work in the morning. I work in a place where it is very difficult to tell what hours someone has worked, and what hours they put to each job. On any given day we have 250 jobs in our system and we book hours to the job based on the memory of the employees at the end of each day, which simply isn't good enough, I wish it was, then none of this would be important. But, I am learning heaps and enjoying it.

Thank you guys