Strange question regarding relationships and database size

[Marco Silva]

Hi.

Something strange hapen in my database. A few weeks ago I post a topic here
regarding the strange size of my database. It jumped from 30mb to 190mb.

Today, someting happen, I discovery that the relationships disappear from my
database and after I compact the database, the size decrease from 190mb to
27mb?

Is there any way of this two things are being related? Relationships
increase the size of the database, well? All this mb?

Regards,
Marco

 

[Stefan Hoffmann]

hi Marco,

Is there any way of this two things are being related? Relationships
increase the size of the database, well? All this mb?

No. The decrease in size by compaction results from the removal of
deleted (no longer used) objects:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/209769


mfG
--> stefan <--

 

[Paul Shapiro]

Relationships do add some size to the db because Access automatically
creates an index for each FK in the child table. But unless your
relationship has a large aggregated field size and you have VERY many rows,
I doubt if the relationships caused the size increase. When you edit objects
or data in an mdb, Access does not always recover the vacated storage. To
get maximum performance the "garbage" is just marked as no longer in use,
and it's left in the file. When you compact the db, Access removes the
garbage. That's usually the cause of the large shrinkage when compacting.

If you saw a sudden large size increase, maybe it was associated with
running some update queries, or even just working with large query result
sets that require temporary workspace in the mdb.