Database capacity issue due too high volume of data and relatively few users/licenses

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Posted on by Gerard Verbruggen

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Hi All,

I work for a company with relatively few users (licenses) and a lot of transactions. Most of the work is automated. Furthermore we have 4 environments:

Production

Pre-Production

UAT (Test)

DEV (UDE environment)

We're at the end of our database capacity and the ridiculous amount of $40 per Gb per month MS is asking is just too much as we will need at least 200 GB for the next 2 years. I really find this amount outrageous. An amount around $4 would be more appropriate.

The major part of the data is in the sales orders, picking lists, packing slips, invoices and all related tables like inventTrans.

I already created a job that removes a lot of transactional data from non-production environments. Although this helps it's just not enough.

Using Archiving (dataverse or BYOD) is not really an option as the data is pretty young (2024-now). And this will also (partially) move costs to Azure BYOD or DataVerse. Furthermore it would require a big redesign of PowerBi and other tools we're using.

We tried talking to MS to negotiate a different amount, but so far they're not really helping us.

I guess I'm not the only one. Are there other users here with similar issues ? What did you do to solve this ?

Thanks !!

Gerard

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Dynamics 365 Finance

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André Arnaud de Cal... 303,730 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi Gerard,

You haven't provided that many details. Managing database capacity requires a holistic overview of the processes and the current consumption per table. Are you talking about F&O database usage or Dataverse? Depending on details, there can be a lot more that you can cleanup.

I have done several cleanup assessments and currently working with an organization which are over 4 TB on top of the entitled capacity. At this client, I think we can get them within database entitlement.

I do agree that database capacity is expensive, but there is more involved than just storage. Have you checked the top 50 tables for database consumption? At the client I'm working on, next to sales orders and inventory transactions, there are other tables responsible for the database growth.

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Gerard Verbruggen 175 on at

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Hi André,

Some additional info:

It's purely the F&O database. In the Dataverse database enough capacity available.

I disabled things like Financial Reporting and AX Datawarehouse in non-production environments.

In all environments, all clean up jobs are running. In non-production environments jobs for, for example. sysDatabaseLog retention is set to 1 or 0 days.

Our PreProd environment is stripped of almost all data. Only static data like parameters, customers, products etc. are left alone.

Our UAT environment only holds data of the last three months as we need this for testing purposes.

My DEV box only contains data of the last few weeks.

Top 10 tables in Production: InventTrans, SalesLine, MRDB.ReportLineAccount, SalesParmLine, GenerallJournalAccountEntry, custInvoiceTrans, WMSOrderTrans, custPackingslipTrans, custTrans

I know I can truncate salesParmLine (Clean up sales update history); Investigating at the moment with which parameters I can do this, but for the rest this is more complex/impossible.

One of the things that makes my live more complicated is that our previous BI guys build a lot of BI reports based on historical sales order data (salesTable/salesLine), which makes it impossible for me to delete older sales order (lines) without first redesigning the whole PowerBi structure and reports.

Please let me know if you have other questions.

Cheers,

Gerard

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Gerard Verbruggen 175 on at

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After investigating this extensively, consult different people etc., there is only one option left for us, and that's using the Long Term Data Archiving to Dataverse. Although it will take serious work on the PowerBI side, there's no other alternative as the amounts MS is charging are so high.

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