Database Size Shrinking

Theatre Manager monitors the size of the organizations database and issues a Start Up Warning Message if the database decreases by more than 0.5%. Normally, a database continually grows as patron are added, tickets are sold, and donations are recorded. Daily use of Theatre Manager, in general, will incrementally increase the size of the database.

That said, from time to time, it is also normal for the size of a database to slightly reduce in size. Reductions in size can result from old e-blast records being deleted after their specified retention has expired (usually set at 1000 days), or if employees have done a patron cleanup (merging profiles), or if older Form Letters or Mail Lists have been archived by staff.

Artsman is seeing database sizes reducing because of COVID-19, mainly that tickets, online shopping carts and events are not generating records in the database.

As a guide, if the size of your database slightly decreases in size it shouldn't be anything to be alarmed about. To help define "slightly", between 1% and 3% is normal. Anything over 3% can be cause for further investigation.

For example, if the size of a database shrinks by 20%, that can indicate a serious technical issue, like running out of storage space, hard drive corruption, or other technical issues that require attention ASAP.

If you find the Start Up Warning Message is occuring frequently and is within the 1% to 3% range, the Alert Message threshold can be adjusted in System Preferences on the Backup tab.