Experience with BVS (Blaze Versioning System)

We have been using a SQL-BVS repository for about 2 years now.  It can be very painful with the SQL involved.  Network latency is a develoment killer.  As for just the BVS part, I have been very happy a number of times to be able to just cancel a checkout and get back to where I was before I started experimenting.  There have been 2 big headaches.  If an item is deleted, then a replacement item with the same name needs to be created, there can end up being name conflicts.  We have had to rename an item to be deleted (we appended the date and initials for the person deleting it) and then deleted it.  Otherwise the same name could not be used again.   The other huge issue is that there is not an  easy method for cleaning up the deleted items.  Everything in the deleted folder stays around forever.  When there is a multi-person project and builds are needed on a regular basis, it could mean lots of partial items in the repository and of course anything that gets deleted stays around forever in the "attic". 

There is no supplied method to "roll-up" to a certain point.  The work-around is to periodically export the repository into a non-versioned repository, delete and recreate the versioned repository, and import the project back from the non-versioned repository.  This means lots of manual effort and consequently room for error.  Also, after this is complete, ALL of the history of changes is lost.  There is no way to save any of the history.