I don’t necessarily feel like writing a shiny opening paragraph for this post. I could try to relate this topic to No Man’s Sky, Pokemon GO, or the Rio Olympics, but I won’t. Let’s dive in to a few reasons why keeping old data is a bad idea.
- Storage sizes: Hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, but as your contact center chugs along, your database is going to grow and grow. You really don’t want to be in the business of frequently needing new hardware to store this information. If you started out your call center with a measly sized drive, you may need to perform some type of migration of your data a lot sooner than necessary, than if you had opted for a larger chunk of storage.
- Migrating data: If you are in the process of upgrading hardware, you’re going to need to migrate that data. If your database is monstrously large, this migration process can take dozens of hours or even days depending on the size. This is a highly unfavourable scenario that could keep your call center from operating until the migration is done.
- Reporting: Running queries on a database can be quick sometimes. If the complexity of the query is relatively simple and the sample size of data is reasonably sized, reporting can be fast and painless. However, a lot of contact center reports use fairly complex queries. Combining these queries with hundreds of GB of database data can exacerbate these queries to the point of being literally unusable. No one has the time to sit around for hours upon hours waiting for a report to return with the results.
There are a few ways you can help to the above cases:
- Get a huge hard disk for your database: Multiple TB drives are quite affordable.
- Truncate irrelevant data: There’s no real reason that decade old data should be a part of your current contact center database. If you seriously need to keep this data, dump the schema and keep it somewhere in storage in case you need to revisit it. You can then trim the database down to a manageable size.
- You can achieve a huge boost in reporting speed and overall database performance if you have a substantial amount of RAM available, combined with using an SSD for your database.
Bigger can definitely be better in the right situation (like expanding your exosuit, starship, and multi-tool inventory slots in No Man’s Sky), but it just isn’t the way to go all of the time.