Tuesday 26 January 2010

Compacting your Specification.

I received a specification file from an architect via FTP this week that was 60MB in size.

Running it through the "Compact specification" tool within the NBS Building software it reduced to 12MB.


Why is this operation necessary?

The database format used for NBS Building is MS Access. When you delete a record from a MS Access database, the space allotted for that record continues to be held in reserve by the database and it is not released for reuse. To avoid generating excess amounts of wasted space, you should compact your database periodically.

The NBS Software Support article on this is:
http://www.thenbs.com/support/softwaresupport/knowledgebase/kb10038spec.asp

A Microsoft help article on this is:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HP051874491033.aspx

1 comment:

  1. Any benefit in creating an auto-compact on close/save option, or a prompt-to-compact-on-close option (on, off, every month, etc)? This would potentially help keep those files tidy with user-interaction but no reliance on user-memory!

    Autodesk adopted a new .dwg format back in 2004, whereby - if I understand it correctly - the files became essentially self-zipping. On every save, the file data was compacted prior top writing to save on network traffic and file sizes.

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