Applications will normally have a maximum number of inventory, customers, etc that can be entered into the database. An example of this is Intuit Quickbooks Enterprise which allows no more than 29,000 inventory items to be created. Windward System Five has much higher enterprise maximums.

The theoretical maximum for inventory would be 2.15 billion items. Practical limit is significantly less coming in at 1 million items. Exceeding 100,000 inventory items really depends upon your workstation RAM and processing power. For a business that needs more than 100,000 inventory items, use the virtual warehouse database to offload un-stocked inventory items. The virtual warehouse limitation depends upon the fields added. If only the base fields are used it would be the 2.15 billion, if additional fields are used such as sizes, brand, and barcode then it will be a couple of orders of magnitude less than this.

Memory requirements for reporting on greater than 100,000 inventory items would be in the gigabytes of RAM.

Field limits:

• Part number is 50 characters
• Part description is 255
• Serial numbers are 40 characters.

The theoretical maximum for customers and Suppliers (added together), is 10 million. Practical limit is about the same but a good amount of RAM and processing power would be required for reporting on more than 100,000 clients. The memory requirements would depend on the columns of information selected for display.

Some examples using the customer find screen and version 6.0 are presented below:

• Listing 15,000 clients with a wild card (%) search requires 170MB of workstation RAM.
• Extending this out, for 100,000 clients, a workstation would require at least 1.1G of RAM to report on that entire list.

Field limits:

• Customer name field is 50 characters in length
• Contact first name field is 15 characters
• Contact last name field is 30 characters

The theoretical maximum by the Pervasive database is well over 1000 connections. The biggest factor in this is conventional memory installed on the file server. Other factors such as network infrastructure, file server performance and the other things that the network and server are being used for will limit how many connections can be successfully managed.

Although it has not been tested, we feel comfortable scaling to 500 concurrent database connections on a file server with a minimum of 4G of RAM. Our largest user at the time of this article had 250+ terminals.

Our theoretical maximum for number of departments is 32,768. Although the database will accept these departments, many System Five screens that display the departments have not been optimized for this huge number. We current recommend no more than 99 departments unless password protection for departments is needed then the maximum supported is 26.

The current limitation for the number of financial years is 39 year periods. An example of a year period is 2009/01 to 2009/12. Since we have been in business from 1984, we have not had a client hit this limit as of yet. We will most likely expand this when it becomes an issue for a client.

The current limitation for the number of layers is 255.

The current limits on the unit fields are as follows:

• Serial 40 characters
• Type 50 characters
• Model 40 characters
• Stock#/License 40 characters
• Make 20 characters
• Model 30 characters)