File size for exported tables?

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Hi again!

I recently created an application that strips some reports (and does some other processes) and in the end, the tables are exported as .dbf files to a network drive for use all over the department in various ways… My question is regarding the size of the files at export.

The process my company has been using for about 10 yrs now, was originally written in C++ and it also exported the files as .dbf … We are intending on replacing the old process completely… We are presently testing my files with all of the end user processes and someone noticed that the old files are MUCH smaller than mine?

The amount of fields is the same …and the record counts vary only slightly… but the sizes of old versus new is wayyyy different…

For example:
Today’s DTRL (Old) table – 9.08 MB (35,267 records)
Today’s DTRL (New) table – 35.6 MB (35,259 records)

I have done my best to pick the appropriate data type for the fields… and really I have only changed a few fields from text to date/time type…

There is not a problem as far as drive space is concerned, as we have over 14 Gig free on the drive used… This is just curiosity on the part of myself and the people I am working for, more than anything… Any ideas why there is such a huge difference between the two files?

TIA!

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Hi,

I did some tests on DBF2, DBF3 and DBF4 type files and the differences between them were small, with DBF2 being slightly larger.

The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe all your string fields are filled to capacity with spaces.
Try to export the string fields with the trim function and see if that makes any difference.

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Hi… Sorry I’m so late in replying…but I had quite a few alterations to make first…

I had also done the same tests that you did… with the same result…

You were right about using the trim function… but I had to take it a little further… The problem was that I was using Make Table queries to create the final tables to be exported… and Access was using the default 255 length for most of the text fields… I had read in the Help files that Access doesn’t reserve the extra space for fields with this length, so I thought size wouldn’t have been an issue… I guess it definitely does reserve the space when exporting to dbf files… I changed my process to use an append query instead for each table… This way I define the proper field lengths and types, and it worked perfectly… I exported them and they were MUCH smaller!

Thanks again for your help!

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