Are you seriously saying you never wiped the DB through 9 years? I do that routinely and it's known to be one of the hacks to maintain performance. As for NT8 being so much faster? Well, let's just say I never really noticed...
I have files on my system that are 20 years old and a db that's approaching 1.7tb in size... why on earth would someone in their right mind think they'd have to periodically "wipe" something? Even if the db in question needed to be occasionally compacted, shouldn't the stupid program take care of that or at least warn of dwindling capacity? I could understand if a single critical disk had a hardware failure but, to wake up one day and have your software just stop working absolutely reeks of a terribly written program. Needless to say I won't be using NT anytime soon.
I won't object to your concerns. Especially since I'm not a computer guy. I'm just saying it's been a recommended procedure (maybe not officially from Ninja) in order to maintain performance. I'm not a NT fanboy either, although it's my main trading software.
Yeah, well, I guess a person has to start somewhere and maybe NT is as good a place as any. This kind of thing is a bit surprising to me now but 20 years ago I don't think I could have guessed my environment would become what it is presently. Things do evolve.
An .sdf file is a SQL Server compact database. That error claiming that the database is corrupt might mislead you. If you use a standalone database viewer you could see if the file is actually corrupt. And if it is you probably can repair it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1953248/how-do-you-open-an-sdf-file-sql-server-compact-edition Database managers normally show a much better error message that could help you to troubleshoot the problem.
yes trading few markets nt7 or NT8 does not matter. Try running 10s of thousands of backtests and you will see a huge difference. It is not only Ninja 8 you need top notch machine to get ninja 8 full potential. After extensive testing MacBook came on top. We partitioned space and installed windows there.
I have been using Ninja since version 5. Not associated with them in any way apart from using the software.