In a table where your records are less than 1k ea (e.g. INVTXN) a couple of hundred MB is going to be a lot of records that have to be indexed and sorted through. Since DBA/Evo ave to read through that pile, especially when doing reports, the tiny bit of time it takes to do a read added to the tiny bit of latency in the network gets multiplied to become seconds, then minutes, and then grumpy users. Keeping your active records down to two years worth can add up to a couple of man-hours a week in time savings if you have twenty users. Each company must weigh for themselves this potential time savings against the time that might be lost going back into the archives when something older must be retrieved.