Case Management

A Note About Archiving

December 21, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

About a week ago, I began archiving records in Timematters. This was pure serendipity. I was backing up and reindexing the database as a part of routine maintenance when I thought I’d take a look at the size of the database. I was amazed to discover that I had over 36,000 phone notes tucked away in a phone record file and more than 18,000 document records in a document record file. (Timematters keeps phone records in one file, documents records in another file, case records in another file and so on.) Of course, I wanted to reduce the size of these files and thought that archiving might do the trick. Turns out that it doesn’t but I discovered something along the way that made me realize that whatever database you use for your practice management system, you need to add archiving to the list of things you do as part of routine maintenance.

With Timematters, as I understand it, when you archive a record, you’re simply setting a flag in that record which tells TM not to search it as a part of normal program operation. (TM still has a “global search” function that will search archived as well as active records but you have to invoke that search. Doesn’t do it automatically.) The record remains a part of the phone record file. This means that if I archived 20,000 of those 36,000 records, the phone record file size doesn’t change but only 16,000 records would be searched during normal operation. So searches on a list of phone records should theoretically go much faster.

The downside is that when you do any search in Timematters over a network, the whole record file is dragged over the network (or so I’ve read), then searched. That doesn’t help with the speed issue at all.

Still, there are some incremental gains to be had by archiving records. It not only cleans up the interface (by moving the archived records so that they do not appear on screen when looking at a list of phone records, thus decluttering the interface), it also speeds up some searches. So I’ve been archiving old records in earnest since I made this discovery. And we’ve now instituted an archive routine when we close cases. Hopefully, this will make things run a little bit faster.

So when I begin considering Mac case management software –I’ll be looking at Daylite 3.6 soon– I’ll be adding the archiving capability of the program as one of the features to evaluate. As the database grows, things naturally slow down. Archiving may not be the only way, but it is one way to tackle the problem of slower searches and response times in databases.