How to make a large project?

[Cotswold]

@DakotaRidge
When I supplied software I would take the Microsoft advice of database sizes as maximums and not as a challenge to prove them wrong. It isn't a competition.
Yes, sometimes a customer ran databases oversize but I always advised against and refuse to support it. I regarded fixing corrupted databases as a waste of my time and the larger they are then the possibility increases. In many businesses current data is often small and once processed rarely accessed again. So why have many years of the stuff pointlessly sloshing about all the time? As far as the FE is concerned, smaller the better in my opinion. Why drag a huge FE up and down the wires? Even the FE bloats over time and needs to be replaced.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

So why have many years of the stuff pointlessly sloshing about all the time? As far as the FE is concerned, smaller the better in my opinion. Why drag a huge FE up and down the wires? Even the FE bloats over time and needs to be replaced.

To amplify Cotswold's point, even with its anal retentive approach to archiving, the federal government DOES trim databases regularly. In my biggest personal database, we had a minimum retention of six months but tempered by the fact that if anything in our DB was not yet completed, we couldn't archive it. We had a rule that we would NEVER mark something for archiving until every option was in a completed status AND it was at least six months old. THEN and ONLY THEN, we could archive it to an external file, followed by deleting it in the master file, which would then undergo a compact & repair.

But "six months" was the need of that particular database. For the U.S. Naval Reserve personnel DB, transactions had to stick around online for research for 10 years as a matter of federal law dealing with military personnel records. Again, archiving DID occur, but in this case, the applicable regulations said 10 years. After 10 years, a different federal division took over and became the primary keeper of the archived files. You have to know the requirements in order to know when to get rid of the "stuff pointlessly sloshing around" - and the odds are that there WILL be some limit somewhere. It pays to know your limits.