Table Stripping

[Megacitizen]

I have a large table of info regarding the individuals who make up the teams we are sending to our Focus City. It currently has 26 columns, stripped down from about 60 and contains the records of about 4000 individuals.

It was originally set up in 2002 to deal with my own Base only and about 80-90% of those listed are no longer active with the Base. I was just wondering if it is worthwhile to remove primary keys and then strip out the details of those no longer on the Base before adding new details of individuals at the other Bases participating in our project and then assigning NEW primary keys, so that they start again from 1 instead of around 4000-something. We are anticipating recording details of around 1000 individuals per Focus City (different city every 2nd year) some repeating and others new.

Or would I simply be better off just copying the columns into a completely new table and starting again from scratch.

 

[VilaRestal]

That number shouldn't matter. It sounds a bit OCD to me.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Add an "inactive" column to the table. This will allow you to identify records to ignore for most queries. At some point, you'll have a query that selects only inactive individuals which will allow you to reactivate someone.

Ditto what Vila said. Don't concern yourself with the actual ID value. It has no meaning except to uniquely identify a record.