I have been doing some house cleaning on my computer, and found a file in the Metastock directory that is 2GBytes. The file name is "ST_DATA.mdb". I openned this with MS Access, and found nothing unusual except for one table "AnalysisEvents" which contains a record of every time "EventText: Simulation encountered a zero-sized order" has occurred on my system as I have run various tests over the past few months; there's literally a million of these records. Now, I have several times used the clean-up tool that comes up with the Metastock System Tester, and this is the kind of thing I would expect it to take care of. Obviously, something is wrong. Now, is the cure simply to delete this file and Metastock will simply create a new one when needed? Should I go into MS Access and delete the records, leaving the file intact? What do you recommend? dc

If that's the best, I'll give it a try. One time a few centuries ago, I did this routine, and the file contained some of the software "keys" and I ended up reinstalling. Thanx dc

I renamed it to ".old" and Metastock starts OK, but the system tester bombs when I call it up. My next effort will be to copy this file (2G!), then use MS Access to delete the records. I'll report back in a day or so. dc

I openned the database with MS Access, and opened the table "AnalysisEvents" . I then deleted all but one record on this (some programs don't like empty tables). This still left the same size file until I remembered under "Tools, Database Utilities" on the Access menu, "Compact and repair". This brought the file down to about 6MB, and the System Tester is now much happier. dc

I am now working with Metastock version 11 but still this systemtester database is a buggy [censored]. Don't try to run multiple large test with lots of optimizations one after another, because that makes the database swell so much that finally you get lots of errors.

First your systemtester will start to crash halfway a run. Then upon cleaning and compacting it will crash with memory problems and you get a lot of trouble to fix this again. Especially if you want to discard all old result at once.

Best way to do this is to firstly compact the database, discard/remove 1 or 2 results, compact the database again, discard old unprofitable results, compact, remove some old results, compact etc. etc. But even then afterwards the systemtester has still a very long startup time needed when clicking the dollar icon in the main Metastock menu.

There were lots of problem with growing database sizes in Metastock 8 and 9 under XP, but now we are working with version 11 and Windows 7 and still the Systemtester database is one of the most cripple part of this other wise good program. And it's one of the most essential parts of a Metastock because what is a trading rule or trading system worth without extensive testing on multiple securities and multiple time frames.

I think times are showing up that you can't produce new versions anymore before final fixing this nuisance in a fashionable manner.