Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

["Gettes, Michael" <>]

And what about Oracle vs. MySQL?  Does Oracle do space mgmt better and if so, how?  Would be great if we could summarize the results of what is learned from this discussion - that page would be very valuable!  I am probably not the best one to curate such a beast.  Stuff like this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the TIER Grouper Deployment Guide which concentrates on more of how to think about this stuff as opposed to these sorts of useful operational Grouper tidbits.  This is where we really learn from each other.  Thank you for having the conversation in the open.

/mrg

On Jan 29, 2018, at 4:22 PM, Rory Larson <> wrote:

Well, there is a "created_on" and a "last_updated" field, which are apparently Unix-type dates.  That would make it possible to delete everything in the table prior to a chosen date.  There's also "server_user_name", which gives the account that ran the transaction, e.g., myself vs. the grouperLoader.  That would let us delete only the ones that were run regularly under the grouperLoader, and keep the changes made by individual users.  I'm not sure how worried we should be about keeping that information.  On a 40 GB table, how long would a selected DML delete take?  And if we do it that way, we are still left with a huge table, because MySQL only marks records for deletion without actually deleting them.  In fact, wouldn't it just make the table bigger by adding all the deletion transactions?

Thanks,
Rory


-----Original Message-----
From: Hyzer, Chris [] 
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 2:45 PM
To: Rory Larson <>; Shilen Patel <>
Cc: 
Subject: RE: [grouper-users] Maintaining Grouper database size

Is there a way to look at the data of the audit table and see which records to delete?   I think any loader jobs audits can be deleted (GrouperSystem is the entity?), but things users do through the UI for example should be kept so you know who did what.  Make sense? Take a look and see if anything jumps out or we can look at our audit tables too...

Thanks
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Rory Larson []
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 3:42 PM
To: Hyzer, Chris <>; Shilen Patel <>
Cc: 
Subject: RE: [grouper-users] Maintaining Grouper database size

Thanks, all, for the suggestions.  I think I'm hearing that I don't want to purge data from large point-in-time tables manually through SQL.  Instead, I should run an edu.internet2.middleware.grouper... command under gsh, such as:

edu.internet2.middleware.grouper.pit.PITUtils.deleteInactiveRecords(new Date(), true); or
edu.internet2.middleware.grouper.pit.PITUtils.deleteInactiveObjectsInStem("my:stem", true);

This will eliminate inactive records or objects only, meaning that if the people are still around, they will still be taking up space with point-in-time data going back perhaps for many years, correct?  And additionally, we would still have to perform an OPTIMIZE TABLE on each PIT table to (possibly) realize any gains?

I will plan to do this, but I'm unsure of how much space, if any, I'm likely to recover.

Another suggestion was made off-line, that I should perform a TRUNCATE on the grouper_audit_entry table.  In fact, this table has grown to about 40 GB, and is apparently the biggest source of our problem.  I understand that this is simply a transaction log table, and that nothing else depends on it.  Truncation means that the table would essentially be dropped and then re-created, minus all the data. That would be done in SQL.  Is there any reason not to do this?  If so, is there a better way to reduce its size?

Thanks,
Rory


-----Original Message-----
From: Hyzer, Chris []
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 1:03 PM
To: Shilen Patel <>; Rory Larson <>
Cc: 
Subject: RE: [grouper-users] Maintaining Grouper database size

Im worried about the future state of using direct SQL, maybe something else in future will be needed that we put in the GSH command... you should definitely use that.



Thanks

Chris



-----Original Message-----

From: [] On Behalf Of Shilen Patel

Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 1:34 PM

To: Rory Larson <>

Cc:

Subject: Re: [grouper-users] Maintaining Grouper database size



If you’re going to trim the audit based on time, I’d suggest using the gsh command since it’ll delete the records from the tables in the right order (taking into account foreign keys).  But as long as you delete them in the right order via sql directly, that should be fine as well.  Also, recently, I documented how much space was being taken up at Duke (we use Oracle).  https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__spaces.internet2.edu_display_Grouper_Duke-2BDisk-2BSpace-2BUsage&d=DwIGaQ&c=Cu5g146wZdoqVuKpTNsYHVKLgTZS09MUACeOXHWmTvE&r=8UxP4WgXNK7VFhDT-iCutw&m=i5pbjVCyOSrgzJa3qHir_ok5n_Zw8MCNGbVSHFXVgZs&s=1qaggpDGSz3DUP03rlkM40RUuYd4lBXJ6ylGMs76vQQ&e=   I was surprised to see so much of the space being used by indexes.  We could possibly look at reducing the number of indexes to help.



- Shilen



On 1/29/18, 9:13 AM, " on behalf of Rory Larson" < on behalf of > wrote:



   Hello,



   We are encountering an issue of our Grouper database growing to a size that threatens to use up the entire hard drive space available.  The database server is a physical machine with no room to expand, running a MySQL-type database (5.5.56-MariaDB MariaDB Server).



   The problem is not so much the size of the group data itself, but with point-in-time tables that record what that data was back to the beginning of the Grouper installation.  Some of these have grown to huge sizes, on the order of 20 GB or so.  A suggestion has been made that we could delete a lot of this prior to some reasonable point in time, especially groups or memberships that no longer exist. This would be fine, but I'm wondering if this can be done from the database command line on a per-table basis, or whether there are dependencies that require doing this through gsh function calls?



   Also, because this is a MySQL-type database, shrinking the database physical size after deletion of unnecessary data is not trivial. OPTIMIZE TABLE ... might work, or it might make a table bigger.  ALTER TABLE ... ROW FORMAT=COMPRESSED is promising as tried on our test database, but takes about four times as long as OPTIMIZE TABLE.  In either case, updating has to be shut down while running them, and they may require duplicating the table during the operation.  We are at 90% now, and can't afford any more big tables.  The ultimate MySQL solution seems to be to dump the database, delete the whole thing, and reload it, which would mean complete downtime for Grouper.



   Does anyone else using a MySQL-type database have a system for handling this problem and maintaining a reasonable database size?



   Thanks,

   Rory