Compact And Repair Your Access Database
Are you one of those people who never files your paperwork or throws
anything away? If you are, you're just like Microsoft Access.
Organized people take every scrap of paper they're not actively working
on and move it off of their desk; either into a drawer, a file cabinet, or
the recycling bin. Their desks always have the minimum amount of space taken
up.
Not-so-tidy people have desks that are piled high with current projects,
finished projects, junk mail, old magazines, print outs from last century,
etc. That's fine if you have a BIG desk, but every so often you need to
clear off some space.
Microsoft Access is one of the not-so-tidy individuals. Once Access has
allocated disk space for a record, it never lets go of the space. Once it's
allocated disk space for a form or report, it never lets go. You can delete
every record out of your database and it won't get any smaller.
Not until you use the Compact And Repair feature, that is. You can find
the utility under the Database Utilities Menu in the Tools section.
The utility checks to see if allocated disk space is actually being used.
If not, Access lets go of it. Even packrats throw away stuff once in a
while.
You should use Compact And Repair frequently when designing new forms and
reports or if you use temporary tables that you delete from and add back to
on a regular basis.
One Warning! Be careful about using Compact and Repair if your
data file is located on a network drive. If you compact a big file on a slow
network you could get a network timeout and corrupt your database
irretrievably. Better to copy the file to a local hard drive, compact it,
then move it back onto the network.