How To Maintain Database With Reasonable Size?

Overview

Your database became too big (noticed a high disk utilization) or disk is filling up regularly, and you would like to know how you can reduce it. If possible, you want to remove old events and keep records only for a specific period or limit the space consumed by the DB to avoid cases when there is no free space on your drive.

Information

GFI EventsManager creates database files and adds to them as time passes. Some of these files can become extremely bloated as more information is added daily. While it may appear that some of these files have been created recently, they were likely created a long time ago. This can be confirmed by right-clicking on the largest file and selecting properties. The “Created” and “Modified” timestamps are likely different. If this is the case, EventManager is functioning as intended.

Solution

You would like to reduce the amount of space being taken up by your database files, and want to alter the settings to automatically maintain your databases. There are two options:

1. Purge old records that you don't need anymore. Make sure to perform both tasks - mark the events as deleted and commit database deletions.
   Note: If your disk is already full and you are unable to purge old records, refer to the article Disk Space Is Filling Up When Purging Old Events.
   
   
2. Configure database rotation - select the desired period for which you want to keep events or the maximum size for each database and the number of databases to create; also, make sure to enable the Delete databases as needed option to automatically remove outdated data.
   
   For example:
   
   • If you need to store events for the previous year, schedule the rotation to be performed each (1) month, set the number of databases to 13. In this way, you will always have access to the past 12 months of data, plus an extra month stored in the active database.
     
     
     
     
   • If you need to keep the size of the DB under 50 GB, set the Rotate when database reaches value to 10 GB and the Number of databases to create to 5.
     
     
3. To additionally reduce the size of your databases, set up custom rules to avoid capturing unnecessary events.