Hi all

I need some advise on this. I (coming from the VFP world) have the tendency to keep only one year's worth of data in a database.

Not just because I can pull the data out faster but also because I have many reports that have summary data to it, for eg. Stock Ledger, will have as the first line in the report for an item the opening stock. To get to this obviously the previous entries needed to be calculated and I have no doubts FireBird will do a superb job at giving me the result very efficiently. This eg. was a simple one, I have complex Govt. reports that need to be generated every month which have, not only, opening stock values of the whole enterprise summarized but also have the various tax opening balances mentioned in the same report and their transaction details and so on all in this one report.

My old system of multiple databases is fine with the above paragraph. Now what prompted this post is that the client in the FireBird version of my software is requesting a summary report not only of the current year in it, but also comparative figures from previous year(s) all on the same report. At this point I am lead to think that I need to have all the years worth of data in the same database. But then raises the questions of various govt. reports requesting complex summaries but only of that one month / year but to get to that I need to summarize the old years data too. More years, more data to summarize, knowing the efficacy of FireBird and assuming FireBird has no limits, the hardware on which the report is run does and will. Where to balance this?

I am sure people here have had to report data from multiple years as well as reports like Stock Ledger which mostly requires the current set but starts with summarized data for Opening Stock. What have they done?

Please advise.

Thanks and regards
Bhavbhuti