Reducing Data Stored in Business Central Databases
The article provides an overview of the different ways to reduce the amount of data stored in a Business Central database. Reducing the size of your database serves the following purposes:
- Prevents reaching the size limit when using Business Central online.
- Improves runtime performance.
- Improves database management processes, like backing up and restoring databases.
These measures are typically done by an application administrator or developer.
Delete unused companies
If you have companies that are no longer needed, such as test companies or the Demo company, delete these companies.
Delete documents
Over time, the database will accumulate historical data for documents, like invoiced purchase orders. If these documents are no longer needed, delete them.
For more information, see Manage Storage by Deleting Documents or Compressing Data.
Use retention policies
Retention policies allow you to specify how frequently you want Business Central to automatically delete outdated data in tables that contain log entries and archived records.
For more information, see Define Retention Policies.
Compress tables
Business Central supports data compression of tables. Compressing table data saves space and helps improve performance of I/O-intensive workloads.
Note
With Business Central online, page-level data compression is automatically enabled on tables in a tenant. It's applied to Microsoft extensions and third-party extensions, unless the CompressionType property on a table is explicitly set to None.
There are two ways to enable or change data compression in Business Central:
On a table-level, use the CompressionType property on table objects.
On a database-level (on-premises only), use the Start-NAVDatabaseCompression cmdlet. This cmdlet is only available with Business Central 2020 release wave 1 and later.
For more information about data compression, see Using table partitioning and data compression.