What is the size limit on the MS business contact database

[Guest]

Can I use Business Contact Manager Outlook for 10,000 contacts with 500GB of
file attachments on a peer to peer network?

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

Can I use Business Contact Manager Outlook for 10,000 contacts with 500GB
of
file attachments on a peer to peer network?

Theoretically 10,000 records is not a big deal for a database.

Do you actually attach files to your contact records? That makes no sense.
BCM will index all your e-mail, but it won't copy it into its database.

I hope you have a backup method in place for all that mail. Because you
don't have a server, that is unlikely. I'd say you are playing with fire.

 

[Guest]

We use the database as a filing cabinet. We attach files, pdf, .wav etc to
each contact. We back up to tape but are looking at other alternatives.

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

We use the database as a filing cabinet. We attach files, pdf, .wav etc to
each contact. We back up to tape but are looking at other alternatives.

OK.

There is a maximum database size limit on BCM. That limit is 2Gb for MSDE.
You can lift that limit with a full version of SQL.

You can also link files that are on the file system to BCM. That's more
attractive than copying files into the actual database. That strategy is a
recipe for a disaster.

Right-click on the Business Contact entry and choose Link. Then you can
point to where your files are, and BCM will remember that. This way you can
link multiple contacts to the same file and generally stay well under the
2GB limit.

 

[Luther]

The limit I've run into most often with BCM is to many
Accounts/Contacts/Opportunities with a lot of activities. Results
depends on the speed of your machine and amount of memory--to keep
Outlook and MSDE from being paged out to disk--, number of clients on a
shared database, and the ratio of activities to parent entities, but at
some point some queries to the database will take longer than a minute
and the db connection will timeout.

 

[Guy]

I wonder if MS is planning a purge utility that would allow you to purge
activity older than a specific date to clean up the database.

 

[Guest]

We are planning to put in a new server with MS CRM and SQL 2005 in 3 months.
I was just hoping that busines contact may have been an interim fix to our
ACT 7 database which is reaching its limit.