Delete vs Inactive??

[winsa]

Hi

Just want to get some feedback re: what is better business practice - for a
record to be deleted or just flagged as inactive?

I'm working with Insurance data for a non-profit organisation and no rules
have really been set on keeping data that is not current.

What are people's thoughts?

 

[Allen Browne]

Winsa, data entry is expensive (in terms of time), so my assumption is that
anything that is entered must be considered valuable. In general, you don't
want to lose the data: just mark it inactive.

That gives you the freedom to perform more powerful data mining later. For
example, you might be considering deleting proposals that did not actually
lead to an insurance sale. But if you just mark it inactive, you can perform
queries to find out which kinds of thing were unproductive, which
potentially could help focus energies better.

 

[Jerry Whittle]

My vote is for Inactive. Someday someone will want to see that deleted data.

Further, I don't like archiving data to other tables or databases. There's
an old saying that archived data is lost data. If performance is a problem
due to the number of records you need to tune the database some, fix the
design errors, and/or move up to a more industrial strength database if you
are getting into millions of records.

 

[Scott F via AccessMonster.com]

Murphy's law is relevant here. The easiest way to ensure that you'll need a
set of data later is to delete it.
I also agree with Jerry's comment on archiving.
Just my $0.02

My vote is for Inactive. Someday someone will want to see that deleted data.

Further, I don't like archiving data to other tables or databases. There's
an old saying that archived data is lost data. If performance is a problem
due to the number of records you need to tune the database some, fix the
design errors, and/or move up to a more industrial strength database if you
are getting into millions of records.

Hi

[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]

What are people's thoughts?

 

[John Vinson]

Murphy's law is relevant here. The easiest way to ensure that you'll need a
set of data later is to delete it.

Case in point:

Hark back to 1978... card decks, mag tapes.

I had the datacenter copy the 24 file drawers of old spectral data
onto tape. Backed it up on a tape in Detroit, and another tape in New
Jersey. Hauled the 24 file drawers of punchcards to the Ann Arbor
Recycle Center in the back of my little Fiesta.

Fast forward a few months.... had a new Real Database, and wanted to
include the historical data from the spectra cards.

The Detroit datacenter had closed and moved to New Jersey. They
couldn't find that tape - lost in the move. OK, there was another
archive tape. When I requested it be mounted the operator said "That's
odd... there are two physical labels on the tape case!"

Yep. It had been overwritten by mistake.

Archived data is lost data! (But only if you need it, otherwise it's
there taking up space).

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Jerry Whittle]

Speaking of tape, a couple of years ago a company wanted me to get data off
some old QIC tape. Trouble was that they didn't have a tape machine any
longer so I had to find one. After that some of the tapes dropped data. Then
the data that was good didn't fit well into the newest version of the
database.

 

[John Vinson]

Speaking of tape, a couple of years ago a company wanted me to get data off
some old QIC tape. Trouble was that they didn't have a tape machine any
longer so I had to find one. After that some of the tapes dropped data. Then
the data that was good didn't fit well into the newest version of the
database.

I've heard that the Air Force has a warehouse underground in North
Dakota, with miles and miles of "LO" density tape: 2400' reels of 3/4"
tape, 200 bits per inch. It contains some of the earliest satellite
photos of Earth. Top-secret for a long while... and now probably none
of it is readable. A lot of land-use and climate-change experts would
dearly love to see those images...

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Scott F via AccessMonster.com]

I'm laughing as I read this because plugged into my laptop is a 1 Gb USB
drive that would be toast if you dropped one of those tape reels on it.