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Concerns about possible wasted storage space
Back in the good old days (1970s – punch card era) we had to be concerned
about every byte of storage space we used (disk, tape, cards, data cell, etc.) Disk drives were very expensive at the time. Fortunately, the cost of storing data has come down dramatically. I have worked with IBM mainframes for many years. Recently I have started to work with Access-2007 which I find to be an amazing software product. Because of my background, I still think about storage space a bit, even though I know that the cost of disk drives is very small. Here is my question. If I define a Text field in Access-2007 to be 200 bytes long and I only have 10 characters of data, am I wasting 190 bytes? Is there any type of “compression” available? I am not concerned about the cost of disk storage, but I am a little concerned about the 2 GB limit per Access database and I am a bit concerned about the traffic on the network with several people using the Access application system. Thanks in advance for your help with this question. |
#2
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Concerns about possible wasted storage space
Text fields take only as much space as required for the data. In other
words, a text field containing 10 characters will only consume 20 bytes (unless Unicode compression is turned on, in which case it's consume 10 bytes) -- Doug Steele, Microsoft Access MVP http://I.Am/DougSteele (no e-mails, please!) "Brad" wrote in message ... Back in the good old days (1970s - punch card era) we had to be concerned about every byte of storage space we used (disk, tape, cards, data cell, etc.) Disk drives were very expensive at the time. Fortunately, the cost of storing data has come down dramatically. I have worked with IBM mainframes for many years. Recently I have started to work with Access-2007 which I find to be an amazing software product. Because of my background, I still think about storage space a bit, even though I know that the cost of disk drives is very small. Here is my question. If I define a Text field in Access-2007 to be 200 bytes long and I only have 10 characters of data, am I wasting 190 bytes? Is there any type of "compression" available? I am not concerned about the cost of disk storage, but I am a little concerned about the 2 GB limit per Access database and I am a bit concerned about the traffic on the network with several people using the Access application system. Thanks in advance for your help with this question. |
#3
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Concerns about possible wasted storage space
As Doug said, space isn't wasted in Access. In fact most modern DBMS don't
waste space unless you force them to with something like using a CHAR data type in Oracle instead of a VCHAR data type which is variable in length. -- Jerry Whittle, Microsoft Access MVP Light. Strong. Cheap. Pick two. Keith Bontrager - Bicycle Builder. "Brad" wrote: Back in the good old days (1970s – punch card era) we had to be concerned about every byte of storage space we used (disk, tape, cards, data cell, etc.) Disk drives were very expensive at the time. Fortunately, the cost of storing data has come down dramatically. I have worked with IBM mainframes for many years. Recently I have started to work with Access-2007 which I find to be an amazing software product. Because of my background, I still think about storage space a bit, even though I know that the cost of disk drives is very small. Here is my question. If I define a Text field in Access-2007 to be 200 bytes long and I only have 10 characters of data, am I wasting 190 bytes? Is there any type of “compression” available? I am not concerned about the cost of disk storage, but I am a little concerned about the 2 GB limit per Access database and I am a bit concerned about the traffic on the network with several people using the Access application system. Thanks in advance for your help with this question. |
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