Activitypointerbase too large, and we have no way to know what to delete.

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Posted on by JS-12110000-0

We have no visibility into what records are taking up space, and therefore don't know what to delete. We don't use activities, opportunities, queues, etc. We use Dynamics 365 specifically for email customer engagement, and our storage creeps up when we send bulk emails from our email campaigns.

We have set up bulk deletion jobs to remove these specific emails, as well as emails with attachments, and emails older than one year old. None of these have had the slightest impact in our database usage. What do we need to delete?

I have contacted MS support about this multiple times, but so far no one has been able to tell us how to troubleshoot the issue. All/any suggestions warmly welcomed.

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Pernilla B 29 on at

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Hi JS.

Have you read about it in Microsoft Learn?

The main reason for the growth, for ActivityPointerBase table, is the regular use of activities in the system.
And even though you have bulk deletion job, that erases the emails, it creates data.

If you have help from a Microsoft partner, maybe they can help to look what kind of activities that is created, behind it all.

If you have workflows that runs, that can be the reason. So set up bulk deletion jobs for those too.

I can send you more information later, I have an ongoing work with deleting records myself :)

Good luck!

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JS-12110000-0 28 on at

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We do not have a partner, and nor should it be required to have one to manage our own data. Personal gripes aside, how can we self-manage this? There are millions of possible combinations to filter the data in this table - what should I look for? What are the common culprits?

You can see by the table below that our usage spikes by about 300MB on certain days, and those days coincide with bulk emails that we sent to our contacts regarding an ongoing webinar series we've been producing. We had assumed that the emails and the attachments were the reason this data was going up - what else would it be?

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JS-12110000-0 28 on at

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@Pernilla B - can you explain more about deleting the job passes and what filters to set to find the appropriate data?

I've even asked Copilot, which puts me in a circular loop by suggesting I clean up this table to reduce space, without telling me how. As I said in my previous post, there are millions of combinations for the filter, and no way to know what to even search for. You suggested removing workflow data; however, from what I've read, this is stored in the AsyncOperationBase table (currently ~300MB), not the ActivityPointerBase table (currently ~14GB).

Here are the support documents I've reviewed - they are all generic, and contain little to no information on how to trim this table, or why it might bloat.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/manage-storage-activitypointer-base-table

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/view-self-service-capacity

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/legacy-capacity-storage

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/data-platform/activities-data-model-storage

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/free-storage-space

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/cleanup-asyncoperationbase-table

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JS-12110000-0 28 on at

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For anyone else out there who has the same or a similar issue, here's what I did to reduce our database by about half:

1.) We had an ongoing Bulk Delete to remove emails with attachments > 0KB. This removed a negligible amount of usage. We believe (again, no supporting documentation) that in-line images that were sent out as part of a bulk-email batch from Dynamics are not categorized as attachments in the table, so...
2.) We created a new Bulk Delete job and set our filter to delete all System Jobs of type Bulk Email.

3.) We created another new Bulk Delete job and set our filter to delete all Emails where our domain was in From and the subject was targeted to the bulk email subject line.
4.) We created a third new Bulk Delete job and set our filter to all Posts.

In each case, we limited the date created to greater than 90 days ago. That seemed to do the trick, however, YMMV.

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Nettsales 20 on at

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Contact Microsoft support once more. But this time ask them to give you a list by count and size of all the activity types in ActivityPointer. They were happy to do this for us but did not offer it. This will show you where the issue is and allow you to craft the appropriate bulk delete jobs.

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