Originally Posted by SeeBuyFly

Database bloat was a thing in the old days, when storage actually cost money. Nowadays, I doubt that a few bytes per account of mileage balance data are an issue given that the accounts themselves ("records pertaining to people who do not fly the airline") remain open.

I recall when our IT people would hound me to delete old e-mails to free up space on the POP server. Perhaps the database administrator culture is left over from those days.

PS I'm not saying that the 18-month cutoff is a big deal.