Slightly OT - Addressable Data Sizes?

  • Thread starter Thread starter xeroxero
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xeroxero

Jet/MDB has a limit of 2gb per database. Visual FoxPro has a limit of
2gb per table. SQL Server has no size limit. Can anyone explain why
the first two databases have limits? Is there something related to
their ISAM nature that limits them?

Thanks.
 
Probably because they are so old that at the time the limit was set it was
thought that it is more than enough.
Just remember the 640Mb PC limit.
And probably it has to do with the way the data is stored - there are
probably some fixed length structures...
 
32-bit memory space. SQL Server does a bit of dancing to get around the size
limit by using pages and extents, etc.

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Gregory A. Beamer
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Think outside of the box!
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Each Jet Database is a single file. Each FoxPro table is a single file.
Until NTFS, the limit per file was 2Gb.

Mike Ober.

Miha Markic said:
Probably because they are so old that at the time the limit was set it was
thought that it is more than enough.
Just remember the 640Mb PC limit.
And probably it has to do with the way the data is stored - there are
probably some fixed length structures...

--
Miha Markic [MVP C#, INETA Country Leader for Slovenia]
RightHand .NET consulting & development www.rthand.com
Blog: http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blog_with_righthand/

xeroxero said:
Jet/MDB has a limit of 2gb per database. Visual FoxPro has a limit of
2gb per table. SQL Server has no size limit. Can anyone explain why
the first two databases have limits? Is there something related to
their ISAM nature that limits them?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Some really good answers so far.
The real question is, why do you need so much space? Many very large
companies kept everything they had on much smaller databases... ;)

SQL Server Compact Edition is 4GB--perhaps this will be more suitable...

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