Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

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Posted on by Tessacq

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We are using Dynamics 365 Sales and Service modules. Our database store is overgrowing, and when looking at the details, the issue is in activity_pointer.

We have made all the recommendations to reduce the store, but they don't help much in our issue. We know that the size in activity_pointer is related to emails and notes (when these records were deleted in our UAT environment, the size is reduced by 9GB) I have looked at the details and there are 69,486 emails. Is that too much?

Is there anything else we can do? is there any column that may be taking a lot of space and that could be deleted?

Please know we don't have any issues with our Filestore.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards

Teresa

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PerezAguiar Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hey teresa.

on docs.microsoft.com/.../capacity-storage you have a nice information regarding Indexes. YOu should also follow those points there:

Because custom Quick Find lookups are created by an admin in the org, these can be user-controlled. Admins can reduce some of the storage used by these custom indexes by doing the following:

Removing unneeded columns and/or tables

Eliminating multiline text columns from inclusion

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Vipin J 1,603 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

For Cleaning storage space in Dynamic CRM refer here : https://vjcity.blogspot.com/2019/06/cleaning-storage-space-in-dynamic-crm.html

You can move attachments to Azure Blob Refer here - https://vjcity.blogspot.com/2019/11/moving-attachments-of-dynamic-365-crm.html

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Vipin J 1,603 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Sharepoint would be another option here - https://vjcity.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-to-do-integration-between.html

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Tessacq 295 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi Vipin

Our problem is with the database usage, I believe these steps are to reduce file usage and log usage mainly, please correct me if I am wrong. I have already deleted the entities Microsoft suggest.

docs.microsoft.com/.../free-storage-space

Thanks

Teresa

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Paul_Bo 70 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi Teresa,

Based on what you describe, the emails are most likely getting stored in an HTML format and this is what is taking up most of your space. You can create your own plugin to strip out everything but the text of the email or there are some products that can help with this. One of the ones I've looked at recently was MSCRM-AddOns Attachment Extractor. It has a specific function for handling emails.

The other item you can look at is making sure that you don't have contact email addresses that are the same as your current user email addresses. This will cause duplicate information to be stored in the Activity Pointer table.

Good luck, and let us know how you make out.

Paul

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Tessacq 295 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi @Daniel Perez Aguiar

Thanks for your suggestion. Reading the article, I am a bit confused about dataverse search and the indexes.

- Do the quick find views of entities not included in the dataverse search affect? In example the Task entity is not included, should I still look at its quick find view?

- For the Task entity, it says that 10 columns are added to the index but when I look to the view only subject is added. I am guessing Microsoft includes some automatically. Should I remove subject because it is a text?

- Do I need to disable and enable dataversearch to remove unused index?

Thanks in advance for your help.

that On the dataverse search it says
[quote user="PerezAguiar"]
Hey teresa.

on docs.microsoft.com/.../capacity-storage you have a nice information regarding Indexes. YOu should also follow those points there:

Because custom Quick Find lookups are created by an admin in the org, these can be user-controlled. Admins can reduce some of the storage used by these custom indexes by doing the following:

Removing unneeded columns and/or tables

Eliminating multiline text columns from inclusion
[/quote]

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Tessacq 295 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi Paul

Thank you for your answer, that is a new perspective from everything I have read, it is of great help. I saw that plugin's name before but thought it was just to extract attachments and we have enough file storage, didn't realise it manipulate the actual email table itself. It makes sense, I am going to look into this.

We do have issues with users being created as contacts. I can't find any solution to that. The issue happens when an employee replies to a support case, the system creates him as a contact automatically. Do you have any suggestions for this?

Kind regards

Teresa
[quote user="Paul_Bo"]
Hi Teresa,

Based on what you describe, the emails are most likely getting stored in an HTML format and this is what is taking up most of your space. You can create your own plugin to strip out everything but the text of the email or there are some products that can help with this. One of the ones I've looked at recently was MSCRM-AddOns Attachment Extractor. It has a specific function for handling emails.

The other item you can look at is making sure that you don't have contact email addresses that are the same as your current user email addresses. This will cause duplicate information to be stored in the Activity Pointer table.

Good luck, and let us know how you make out.

Paul
[/quote]

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PerezAguiar Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hey Teresa.

The main question is: do you want to perform searches on that table (task, for example)? if you do, just add the minimum set of fields (Subject for example). YOu should avoid text fields that are large (Like "Description" or as Paul stated previously: Email body).

If you enable/disable dataverse search, the current index for DataverseSearch is released. but once you enable it back, they will populate again. For sandbox/Testing environmnts this might be a nice approach to reduce their consumption

There are other possibilities as well

a) you can try purchasing additional database storage.

b) you can open a reques to Microsoft Support to verify why the storage consumption on this table.

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Paul_Bo 70 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi Teresa,

I think there are two approaches here, one is take a look at the create rules from the inbound emails and see if you can exclude your companies domain name. To do this, go to the queue where the inbound email address is set to create new cases. At the bottom of the page there should be a section called record creation and update rules. See if you can do an exclusion there.

The other suggestion would be to create a power automate that runs on "Contact Added" where you are checking to see if the contact email contains your companies domain name.

(endswith(emailaddress1, '@domain.com'))

Any resulting contacts can then be either deleted or deactivated.

Let me know how you make out.

Thanks,

Paul

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Tessacq 295 on at

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RE: Dynamics 365 Database Capacity Issues

Hi Paul

Thank you for your help. The mscrm-addon attachment extractor is working perfectly. I am using the email component service. Our database was originally 13 GB and we have been able to reduce 5 GB of database storage.

Kind regards

Teresa

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