It's not Big, it's Large

The database of every Ax installation will grow over time. How fast? Depends on the activity.
Which modules our active? How many transactions are created? Do you have 10 invoices a day, or a 1000 a day. Many different factors influence the data growth.

You can check which tables occupy the most space in your database. Ax has an out-of-the box report to do some follow up. You can find it under Admin - Reports - Size of company accounts.

This report gives detailed on all the database tables, with a record count and an estimated size used.
The outcome may stimulate you to clean up some old data, and allows you to focus on the right direction as well. (Again, Ax has some built-in functionality for that also.)

Also, be on to lookout for not so obvious suspects responsisble for excessive growth in database volume. Like table SysTraceTableSQL. On our installation, it had grown to several gigabytes over the years, claiming way to many disk space.
This system table stores information about trace events. You can purge the old data if you want, after you've done analyzing it. (Be carefull with your timing though, as deleting a table of several gigabyte can stall your database server.)



(Oh and yes, this blog post title was lent from Lyle Lovett.)