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February 12, 2020 at 8:00 AM

SNOW DB, maintenance, increase performance

Hi everyone.

Since 2016 when we implemented SNOW we haven't deleted any inventory or usage data from our database.

It seems that this is beginning to impact the performance of SLM and reporting.

I would like to export all data from the database for a certain year, to separate databases that, if needed, can be reimported to our system or viewed in some way.

My thoughts is to create separate databases for 2016 and 2017 to start with and when the export is done delete the data from those years from the production database.

Has this approach been used by anyone?

Regards /Håkan

MarcoCambon
6 years ago
Hi Hakan and thanks Jonas for mentioning me . When you say that you never deleted data since 2016 you probably mean that you never manually did it, but Snow has a "Garbage collect" service that (should) delete old data -for example Metering- on the Snow Inventory DB older than (usually) 1 year, although this value can be changed in the snowserver.config. When you say you never "deleted" any inventory do you mean that you never deleted any quarantined/inactive machine? In your plan consider that things go complicated as Snow sits upon two databases and you should know exactly which data you want to retain.
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Jonas Nilsson Notrex
6 years ago
Perhaps this is a stupid question, and I'm sorry in advance if that is the case - but why do you want to retain historical data for so long? To me it sounds at best that it only takes up unnecessary storage and processing time. I think that Snow is not designed for what you are looking for - Snow is mostly designed to collect inventory for the purpose of displaying license need. But to answer your question - I would perform an export of relevant reports (Computer Hardware, List All Computers, Applications per Computer, and so forth) including all columns (so as not to lose any data that you might not possibly need in the future). After that, I would create a simple Power BI report that reads these reports. I would also continuously (once per month or so) continue to export these, and store. And of course, enable quarantine and auto-delete.
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- HAKBR63
  6 years ago
  Hello again. Maybe I was a bit unclear in explaining my thoughts regarding increasing performance in SLM... :-) What I was thinking about was to make a SQL-script in the database server that exports data between certain dates to another SQL instance and then deleting the data from the SNOW DB thus improving performance in SLM. Hope this make things clearer.
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  - Jonas Nilsson Notrex
    6 years ago
    Ah... A few years back I asked one in the Snow support whether it would be possible to see what a computer in the License Manager database looked like at a given date backwards in time - but he replied it wasn't possible, and he knew other has asked for it. I don't know how you could do it - either contact your account manager at Snow, or if you want to do it yourself, check with someone knowledgeable like .
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peryngfalk
6 years ago
Hi there! I would look into using the feature "Archive" computer as one option. The other thing you could do is to set some important reports up like "All Computer" report to be executed once per month and send it to a file share. Then you have the history over time. All the best, Per
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