With more and more customers moving from Standard to Premium, our need for articles affecting Standard Editions has substantially decreased. However, as much of our content comes from answering real-world questions and issues from our customers, we felt it was time to create an entry about this topic. Over the last few weeks we have come to the rescue of 2 more customers running GoldMine Standard. Basically, they had outgrown the technology.
First developed in 1979, dBase, GoldMine Standard Edition’s database management tool, is understandably limited by its age. One of those limits is size. Created in the day when most of us measured RAM in Kilobytes [KB] and disk space in Megabytes [MB], a limit of 2GB likely seemed to many as “more than we would ever need”!! Also affecting you is the old Borland Database Engine which can only effectively manage up to 2 Million records.
And here lies the danger to your data. If you are still happily running GoldMine Standard Edition, your dBase version of GoldMine is now as young as 5 but as old as 15+ years. That said, you might have that many years worth of information. All that information can add up to a lot of space. Once you hit the 2GB limit per file, that file will begin to corrupt. Once you exceed the 2 Million records per file, Borland can have difficulty working with your database. So here is what you need to do.
This example will assume your GoldMine is installed in G:\GoldMine\ and your database is in the G:\GoldMine\Common\ folder. Please adjust accordingly.
- Go to your G:\GoldMine\Common\ folder and sort by file size. Are any files approaching 2GB?
- Go to your G:\GoldMine\GMBase\ folder and sort by file size. Are any files approaching 2GB?
- The next time you run your maintenance, which you should be running regularly, pay attention to the record count for each table. Do you have any tables whose file size is approaching 2 Million records?
Your most likely culprits will be your e-mail text table (MAILBOX.DBT) or your History Notes table (CONTHIST.DBT) but there could be others. Should any of your files be approaching these limits, please contact your GoldMine partner immediately. If you don’t have a partner, you are more than welcome to contact us at 909-740-3886.
Happy GoldMining!!