Reasons why data size matters
- Data size or rather tenant capacity is reflected in the price the end user pays
- Data size influences performance: smaller databases allow for efficient processing, faster backups, reports, sorting records, faster page display …
To see the current data size, for the entire database and per environment, in the admin center, click on the Capacity blade:
To increase the capacity of their environments or increase number of environments, customers can purchase through their partners, additional capacity Add-Ons (check this).
Under Customer subscriptions, their Partner can purchase additional capacity:
To stay within their license capacity, customers and/or their partners need to handle their data size and compression.
Handle and Compress Data
Users can start with the Table Information page and use Data Administration action or directly launching the Data Administration page from Search.
This page/view contains two lists: one displays data per table and the second list summarizes data per company:
Through Data Administration page one can note or perform the following:
- Refresh action: updates tables’ size and can be scheduled via a job queue
- Data Cleanup: various reports can be run to delete Change Logs, Document Archives, Invoiced Documents and so on.
- Data Compression
- various reports are used to delete and archive ledger entries and registers:
- A link to Companies page, allows for deletion of companies or copy an existing company under a different name:
- An action to Retention Policies brings up a list of records from Retention Policy Setup table.
- And drilling deeper, we can inspect the Retention Policy Setup record via Retention Policy Setup Card:
- If you drill down on the Table ID you can see there are a limited number of tables that have defined retention policies:
- To add your own table in the list above please read Stefano’s blog.
- There is also a Data Administration Guide action. This wizard takes users through retention policies list, manage companies page, data compression of different tables
A few notes about archiving
- the archiving mechanism is not a backup restore system
- integrated in the Data Compression processes, a report option for archiving for each data compression report
- can be exported to excel or csv files: look in Data Archive list page
- ability to archive any data to be deleted: start logging, delete data, stop logging.
- Example: lets archive some test vendors:
- A quick test of deleting a test vendor reveals the Data archive record and the excel (or csv) created:
- archives are stored in media fields in Data Archive Table: Table Fields (json) and Table Data not counting in the database size
More to check in Microsoft’s Tomas Navarro and Bardur Knudsen’s video “Data Management in the Business Central Application”.
