GoldMine CRM has been used by some firms for 10, 15 and even 25 years! First Direct Corporation is one of the few Solution Partners that have been active since GoldMine was run on a DOS operating system. We did hundreds of upgrades to the first “Windows” edition of GoldMine 2.5. We’ve seen it all!
Today, GoldMine runs on an MS SQL database engine, versus the old days of the “dBase back-end.” While SQL is certainly a high performance database engine that is adequate for most organizations, there are some GoldMine users who have accumulated a rather large volume of history from emails, including linked graphics. Generally this does not present a problem. But recently we’ve run into a few firms where this presents a problem.
The issue comes about when an organization has a Contact Record in their system with an exorbitant amount of email history and linked files. This is typically only going to happen with an organization that’s been using GoldMine for 10 and more years and has a record in their system with which they have been very active on for all that time.
The result in such cases is that when a GoldMine user goes to that record’s History or Links tab and it takes an unacceptable amount of time for the tab to refresh. They also experience a significant lag when anyone tries to email that record from GoldMine.
Not only does this slow down the user on on that record, it can actually cause enough of a spike in CPU usage that it even overloads your server’s resources and slows it down. The problem can be so server that it even triggers alerts/notifications of a performance issue on your server. If this happens, the entire office can experience a degradation in the performance of GoldMine.
If this situation is occurring at your firm, I encourage your IT/GoldMine Administrator to take steps to resolve the problem. There are a couple of tactics/ways to do so:
- Archive record history
- Purge linked graphics
- Create a new record and moving certain history to the new record
If your organization needs assistance please contact First Direct Corporation and have a GoldMine/SQL data specialist work with you. This is NOT a very time-consuming task and the benefits are well worth the effort! Not only will it improve everyone’s experience with GoldMine, it will also help with productivity since this issue is a real time-killer.
