Size or Capacity Limitation (Q Mac)

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Is there a limit on the number of transactions in the check register?.

Joe W. Brown, CPA

Are the limits in the "size or capacity limitations" also applicable to the Mac platform?

Chris_QPW

Joe W. Brown, CPA said:

Are the limits in the "size or capacity limitations" also applicable to the Mac platform?

No those were stated for the Windows version.  I don't think I have ever heard of any posting of exactly what the limitations are for Quicken Mac (Subscription).

jacobs

I think we've been told there is no limit (or no practical limit) on the number of transactions in an account or file in Quicken Mac. Its modern SQLite database can deal with 2^64 rows in a table, although the file would be dozens of terabytes in size. So unless you anticipate having hundred of trillions of transactions, you shouldn't need to worry.

Chris_QPW

One of the things you will notice when you look at the limits stated for Windows is that there isn't a transaction limit stated.  And frankly given the newer database in Quicken Mac I certainly don't expect that kind of limit.

The other limits in Quicken Windows strike me not as "database limits", but instead "design limits".

Let me give you a few examples "512 accounts", "250 Split lines", Categories, subcategories, and tags - Up to 32,768 of each "Dollar amount - A Quicken file cannot have an entry that is larger than 99,999,999.99".

Even though one might try to be as flexible as possible sooner or later you are faced with a decision that weighs the size of storing something with the likelihood that you will have a need for something larger.  For instance 32,768 is the exact max size that a 16-bit number can hold.  Sure you can increase whatever is holding that, but say that is something you have repeatedly store in your database.  Your database size is affected by this design decision.

Or maybe even performance over flexibility.  The number of digits limit can come from two sources (storage size, an GUI space).  One is that they use a double to store the amounts.  They have about a 14 digit precision limit, and what isn't shown above is how many digits you are going allow after the decimal point.  The crypto currency people want more than the current 6 digits after the decimal point that Quicken Windows currently supports.  Could they expand that?  Yes but it going to REALLY cost.  A double is 64 bits, but even more than that all the modern floating point processors are built on this size so increase it and not only do you take up more space for every number in Quicken, you slow it down drastically as it has to do math on very large floating point numbers outside of the hardware that speeds this up.  Not to mention trying to allow space in the GUI.

I don't think any of these "design limits" for Quicken Mac have been stated.

And that is before you get to the "practical limits".  There isn't any stated limit of transactions in an investment account in Quicken Windows, but because of how they have implemented it performance goes into the mud when there is a lot of transactions/securities/security lots.

I believe in Quicken Mac people are already seeing some of this kind of thing in some search situations.