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We are a project-based business with 200 live projects and forecast on a monthly basis. We currently use snapshot with details in Aurena Apps 10.

As we came up to 12 months of live running we got a case raised by support to say we had gone through 90% of diskspace.  Examining the Top 20 objects list that support sent, 10 of the 20 referred to Project Snapshots (either tables or indexes).

Over 25% of our diskspace appears to be taken by objects relating to project snapshots, with PROJECT_SNAPSHOT_DETAIL_TAB by far the largest, with 109,343,625 (yes, 109 MILLION!) records taking 31.76GB!

The next two biggest objects are indexes relating to PROJECT_SNAPSHOT_DETAIL_TAB taking another 32.46GB between them!

It is estimated the forecasts about to be created by the business will increase the PROJECT_SNAPSHOT_DETAIL_TAB table by 4GB alone! The solution provided by Support is to upgrade the diskspace - this is not a viable solution as it will continue to grow exponentially

We don’t need to keep all historic snapshots (the business has asked to keep the latest 3 for each project which would free up considerable space) but there doesn’t appear to be any functionality to allow snapshots and relating details to be removed or cleaned up.

We were directed to the Cleanup Snapshot History Data function and thought it wasn’t working correctly but Support have informed us this routine only removes duplicate entries from the PROJECT_SNAPSHOT_DATA_TAB table and doesn’t remove old data from that table, and doesn’t cover the other tables involved.

This is not what we require. We need the cleanup routine that allows us to remove old snapshots and all the data associated so that these tables (and indexes) remain at a reasonable size, rather than growing exponentially.

It appears this question has been mentioned in multiple Community posts but none provide a solution:

21st April 2020: 

08th May 2020: 

06th July 2020: 

01st August 2022: 

Are we missing something obvious, or is the functionality to remove or clean up snapshots missing? How can we reliably and safely remove old, unwanted snapshots from the system?

@Dan Wymer in IFS Cloud there’s this page where you can select which Project snaphot you wanna cleanup. Not sure about Apps10 tough.

 

Below is an excerpt from the documentation about this page:

Explanation

This activity describes how to perform a cleanup of snapshot history data for a project. When a project connection is created, project information including connection details is copied to a snapshot history table. The data available on the snapshot history table can be seen on the Snapshot History Data page. This snapshot history data table accumulates data when project connections are created, deleted or refreshed. As a result, this table could grow to be very large over a period of time. Cleanup snapshot history data is the feature to delete older or unnecessary records in the snapshot history data table to reduce its size.

When you want to delete snapshot history data for projects before a certain date, you need to enter a History Cut Off Date. This indicates that all records for selected projects, regardless of status, before this date will be deleted from the snapshot history data table, leaving the last cost reporting entry for each object before this date. Note that it is not possible to create a new snapshot with a Cut Off Date earlier than the History Cut Off Date.

When a cleanup of snapshot history data is performed for projects in status Closed, Completed or Cancelled, no History Cut Off date should be entered. All records in the snapshot history table, with no consideration to date, will be deleted for projects with the selected status.


@Dan Wymer in IFS Cloud there’s this page where you can select which Project snaphot you wanna cleanup. Not sure about Apps10 tough.

 

Hi Marcel, it does indeed exist in Apps10; that’s the routine I referred to in my original post (and is mentioned in the other linked posts) that IFS Support confirm does nothing other than remove duplicate records in a particular history table - it does nothing to remove old snapshots and doesn’t span across any of the other supporting tables so is of no use in reducing the size of the tables. Thanks for interacting.


Then, I’m afraid you only way to get this done is to ask IFS for a cleanup script and deploy that. Since this issue is so widespread I guess they might have something readily prepared. Unfortunately there’s no system parameter for deleting snapshots older than xx days. I always thought the Snapshot History Data - Cleanup Information was doing that 🤐


We engaged an IFS Projects Consultant recently to assist us with this but he indicated there is no readily available script with R&D.

We went ahead and created our own script to delete data from both Project Snapshot Header and Detail tables but it takes a long time to run as there are several millions of records esp. in the detail table.

The Cleanup Snapshot History Data button works partially by deleting only header data both in Apps 9/10 & Cloud but bulk of the data resides in Details tab.


Hi @Srikanth,

 

I'm not certain if the following steps will be effective under high load:

  1. Copy the entire table to a new one using 'CREATE TABLE AS'.
  2. Truncate the original table.
  3. Insert the required snapshots from the backup table back to the original table."

Regards, Shehan


Hi Shehan,

 

Thank you for your inputs.

Your solution works for tables with fewer records but we are looking at tables with several millions of project snapshot records. Also, we are hosted by IFS and direct database access is limited to non-production. Hence the expectation is for IFS to provide a delivery to cleanup obsolete data especially when the out of box IFS cleanup screen isn’t touching snapshot details table where bulk of the data resides.


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