Managing the size of your LiveCycle database
A user on the Adobe forums, recently posted a comment about noticing that his LiveCycle database was increasing rapidly over time.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1934388#1934388
You may have noticed the same with your own database, as well as the size of the Global Directory Storage, particularly if you’re running larger numbers of long lived processes involving users.
It turns out that quite a big chunk of this data is temporary data, that doesn’t really need to be kept around after the process has completed. Luckily, there are a few ways in which you can remove this data.
1. You can use the Adobe PurgeProcessTool.
This tool completely deletes all trace of processes that meet a particular criteria (usually, they must be comleted, and older than a certain date). After you run the tool, that process and all its data will be gone – there is no record that it ever existed. You can find a batch file (modify for Unix) at: C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\LiveCycle_ES_SDK\misc\Foundation\ProcessPurgeTool
Note: We recommend you only purge process types that you have created and make sure you test this in your Test machines before you activate in in Production.
2. You can use the Avoka purge tool.
The Avoka tool takes a slightly different approach. It leaves the old processes intact, but removes a whole lot of superfluous information that is stored along with the process instance. It removes:
- The data associated with certain internal data structures. This data accounts for the vast majority of the size associated with process instances, and is generally completely superfluous. (The only exception is if you’re invoking processes programmatically, and polling for the results.)
- Optionally, the data associated with attachments within Workspace. It doesn’t remove the record that there was an attachment, but if you try to download the attachment, it will be a zero byte file. Note that any attachments are duplicated at every single user step, potentially resulting in very large data in the database.
Our general recommendation is to use both tools:
- Use the Avoka Purge Tool on a weekly or even daily basis. This means that you can still search and track historical processes, maintaining audit trails – it doesn’t delete the whole process, just the unneccessary data associated with each process.
- Quarterly or annually, use the Adobe purge tool to remove all traces of processes that completed in the previous quarter/year – providing you don’t want those records for historical analysis. Ensure that you have a backup of the database before you do this.
One of our recent customers had reached a database size of 50GB, and was running out of capacity. By using the Avoka Purge Tool, we were able to reduce the database by 80%, without any loss of historical process data.
The bottom line is that the Avoka Purge Tool will dramatically reduce your database size, without removing your ability to search and track historical process instances.