Dynamics 365 Business Central: Data Administration

Related to the new storage policy post I’ve written some days ago, someone of you have asked if it’s possible to check with more details the capacity of each environment (like space used for every table anf for every company) and also if it’s possible to clean up data on certain tables without creating custom tasks.

As a tenant administrator, the first place to check for space usage inside an environment is the Admin Center. Here you can see the stirage used for each environment you have and you can also check the storage per table on each environment by clicking on the List of Tables link:

When clicking on this link, page Table Information (8700) opens with the details of every table usage (No. of records, Record size, size of the table, size of the indexes and type of data compression in use). But this is an analysis, you cannot take actions here.

Starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 18.2 version, a new page called Data Administration was introduced.

If you open this page from an environment and click on the Refresh button, you have the following data at your fingertips:

In the top part of the page you can see the list of tables in your environment and for each table you can see the number of records on it, the data size, the last 30 days period size (how the table is grown in the last 30 days) and the growth % in the last 30 days. These data are useful to analyze what tables grown frequently and instead what tables are static (candidate tables for example to have a data compression).

In the bottom part of the page you can see the companies you have on the selected environment and the size for each company (+ the total size of your environment).

But what you can do also from that page?

If you click on Actions, you can do a Data Cleanup for the following entities: change log entries, document archives, invoiced documents, marketing documents, cost accounting entries, phys. inventory ledger entries.

Each of these functionalities opens a ProcessingOnly report that permits you to insert filters you want and then cleans up the data:

You can also select the Date Compression option and from here you can Compress Entries or Delete Empty Registers:

Each of these functionalities (as before) opens its relative ProcessingOnly report for applying filters:

From the Data Administration page there’s also the possibility to start a nice wizard by clicking on the Data Administration Guide action:

This wizard reminds (and helps you) to configure the following types of data operations:

• configure data retention policies (I’ve talked about this in the past here)
• checking unused companies
• applying date compression on selected ledger entries tables (over time, ledger entries can increase the size of your database. You ca use date compression to summarize the entries from a specific period of time, and keep only the most important information).

I think that during the years most of you have implemented their custom tasks for data cleanup. Now you have some data management functionalities out of the box and I suggest to check this page if you want to reduce the size of some of your environments.