This is frustrating for a number of reasons:

1. New employees who never worked with those older values get confused when pulling queries, running reports, using datalists
2. For code tables with vast numbers of inactive fields, such as an annual revenue attribute (for example, we have one for every year’s Gala since 1988 for both accepts, regrets, and raffle gifts. I make them inactive, but that means there are ninety attributes) it means any report built off them would be very messy looking and not appealing to my senior leadership.
3. For situations like the interaction categories, where I realized we made a mistake in conversion, it feels like we cannot make a change to our coding without doing massive amounts of data clean-up to old records going back 30 years
   1. And interactions couldn’t just be adjusted to the new values with a script – these are free-text narratives that would need to be reviewed manually to be reassigned
   2. AND the categories are different types of categorization – the old coding was inbound vs. outbound, and the new coding is quality of contact, so they would definitely need to be manually reviewed