Access 97 mde file size never changes

[tomeboon]

I support an Access 97 application where the front-end and the database are
not separated. I recently encountered an interesting situation where the .mde
file has not increased in size during the past several weeks. The file size
is stuck at 97,468 KB. The users continue to add data to the database, but
the size remains constant. My next step is going to be a record count from
day to day, but I would like to know if anyone else has seen the same problem.

 

[John Vinson]

I support an Access 97 application where the front-end and the database are
not separated. I recently encountered an interesting situation where the .mde
file has not increased in size during the past several weeks. The file size
is stuck at 97,468 KB. The users continue to add data to the database, but
the size remains constant. My next step is going to be a record count from
day to day, but I would like to know if anyone else has seen the same problem.

Have you Compacted the database?

One little-known fact: Access grabs disk in 32KByte chunks. If the
users have added 29.56KBytes of data, and the previous checkpoint was
right after it grabbed a 32k chunk, you'ld see no change in size.

Or, there might be deleted objects and Access is reusing some of the
space - I'm not sure under what circumstances this might occur.


John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Larry Daugherty]

John,

Where ever do you learn those arcane bits of lore like in your 2nd
paragraph? I'm sure you've explained something I didn't know but I
still don't understand it.

However,I agree that compacting will probably bring the size back into
line. Once space has been allocated it is committed until compaction.

HTH

 

[Tony Toews]

One little-known fact: Access grabs disk in 32KByte chunks. If the
users have added 29.56KBytes of data, and the previous checkpoint was
right after it grabbed a 32k chunk, you'ld see no change in size.

Furthermore as soon as the client opens the backend Access, or more
likely starts updating/inserting records, bumps up the size of backend
MDB by a few or even 10%.

I noticed on a 300 Mb backend with about 160 tables, a few hours after
compacting, that the MDB was about 10 or 15 Mb larger. I assume Jet
is allocating empty pages for index and record inserts updates.

Or, there might be deleted objects and Access is reusing some of the
space - I'm not sure under what circumstances this might occur.

While I won't strenuously disagree with this comment I've never seen
any indication of this anywhere.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
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