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	Taking Up Space How much do you need? Hard disk storage requirements	Tip #: 1.4.20
		Ver(s):V2, V1

We’ve often been asked to estimate how many records per megabyte (MB) of storage PTWin will use. Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules regarding records per megabyte because it’s a moving target.

First, some drives are formatted to use space more efficiently than others. Secondly, PTWin allows you to enter as much text as you want into Memo fields, and store an unlimited number of graphic images. This flexibility means we do not control the maximum size of the records so we can’t accurately calculate a records per megabyte ratio. However, we can give you some average rules of thumb for thinking about space requirements.

Not counting Memo and Graphic fields, if you were to fill every character in every field in every data table available from the Permit window you would use about 10,000 bytes. Of course we have never heard of anyone who comes close to filling every field. In actuality most people use less than 3,000 bytes to store a permit record (including Memo & Graphic fields!). By this measure you get about 335 records per megabyte, or 5,000 records for every 15MB of storage.

As for PTWin itself, Stand-Alone installations are a little over 20MB. A Network Server installation is about 17MB. A Network Client installation is about 4MB, and each installation of the BDE or IDAPI database engine is about 2.5MB.

Lack of hard disk space should not be a problem for most people. Your average computer these days comes with a 13 to 15 gigabyte hard drive. That translates to 5 million permit records!

Click here to see a glossary of PTWin32 terminology

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