DB Maintenance: Compress Database

You should compress your database at least once a month. A database that has not been compressed can become sluggish because obsolete records are not getting cleared out and the database is getting needlessly large.

Until you compress your database, deleted records remain in the database in hidden form. These hidden records make it possible to restore accidentally deleted records, but they can also prevent you from making changes to other records that refer to these hidden records. (For example, a Product involved in Lot records will not allow change of Size Set.) When you compress the database, those hidden deleted records are truly purged from the database (as long as they are not protected by Historic Production Detail Protection).

To manually invoke database compression, use Bundle-Track's menu to select File >> Database Administration >> Compress Database.

You can set Bundle-Track to automatically compress portions of the database with each Pay Period close. For details, refer to your User Guide under Miscellaneous >> Database Administration >> Compress Database.

If your system has been running slowly, we recommend that you check under Settings >> General Setup >> Pay Groups to make sure that every Pay Group has 'Compress Data Automatically' selected (on the History Data Control tab). If any of your Pay Groups didn't have that option selected, there's probably a lot of compression work to be done, and this would be best done overnight. Just before you leave tonight, you should manually start a compression so the database can do the work overnight. Then, in the morning, you should perform a Backup and Restore. From then on, compression will occur automatically as part of Period Closing and it won't take so long.

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