This topic is one that I've had in the back of my mind for months now. We're currently mid-stream in a total rewrite of a major application that involves transferring data from a Sybase SQL Anywhere DB to MS SQL Server 2000. (that is an issue in itself, but one one I'm too worried about right now) What has been a concern for me is the need to trim the size of our result sets when desktop applications are querying the server for records. Current design, as well as business process and legal issues, have meant that we must keep all historical data accessable. When someone goes to run our app, they're most likely only concerned with the last weeks worth of data. But, when someone goes to run reports they're going to want the last 3 months of data, and that could be in the 100s of thousands of rows, all the way up to current. I guess my biggest obstacle is what to do with foreign-keys.?? there is always a possibility that a user will need to update an old record, and I don't want to lose data integrity. so, maybe we have been doing worst practices, but I don't know a solution. ? does anybody else?