Open Dental Forum

Dear All,

Any suggestions on how best move/purge from database older patients with their records, procedures, images etc.

TIA,
Igor

Our reasoning is that since hard drive capacity is growing much faster than anyone's database, it makes no sense to purge anything. We may eventually decide that things such as the security audit trail are massive enough to archive/purge. But it hasn't been an issue yet.

Or if you mean just from within the program, getting rid of patients in the list, that's just a matter of setting them inactive. For example, when they come up for their 10th recall reminder, or whatever criteria you choose. Maybe if they don't pay their bill for too long, they need to be set inactive.

Thank you Dr. Sparks,

Should we expect certain number of patients, where the database becomes too slow?
What is the biggest that you customers are running?

TIA,
Igor

No. The number of patients would never cause a slowdown. I can't really think of anything at all that would cause a slowdown. What gets annoying as the database grows is actually just how long it takes to back it up every day. That's the only reason I can think of to want to purge old data.

Thank you.