Knowledge Base

Pruning legacy data from PingPlotter 5

Question

Is there a way to prune data from legacy PingPlotter 5 data stores?

Answer

Yes!

We're still plotting a way to build a data pruning option directly into PingPlotter - but in the meantime, we've built a command line data pruning utility (which can be found in the "attachments" section at the bottom of this article).

Inside of the .zip file is a "PPDataMaintainer.exe" file - which needs to be launched via a command prompt. When launching it, a few things do need to be specified: the location of the "sessions.ppdata" file on the machine, and what action the data maintainer should take.

Note: PingPlotter and it's Windows Service (if applicable) should be closed before beginning pruning process.

How it works

The data maintainer tool works to trim excess data from PingPlotter's data store, while allowing users to provide parameters to specify how much data they'd like to retain (see Actions below). If the data maintainer is ran without any parameters provided, it will remove all data exceeding 30 days old by default.

Specifying the location of the "sessions.ppdata" file

If PingPlotter is running as an application, the "sessions.ppdata" file can be found in the local application data folder (C:\Users\**username**\AppData\Local), and can be specified with the following command:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata"

If running as a service, the file can be found in the program data directory (C:\ProgramData), and can be specified with this command:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%programdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata"

Actions

The data maintainer can currently preform two actions; it can delete old trace data, and rebuild/shrink the data store.

Delete

There are two options to delete data:

#1 - "DeleteBeforeDate" - which deletes all data that is older than the date specified. For example, all data collected before the first of the year could be deleted with the following command:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata" --action delete --deletebeforedate "1/1/2016"

#2 - "DeleteDaysOld" - which accepts a number of days worth of data to keep (and this option does allow for decimals). To delete all data older than 30 days, the following command could be used:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata" --action delete --deletedaysold 30

Shrink

The "shrink" option actually reclaims any disk that the data store isn't using and rebuilds indexes. This action can be called with:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata" --action shrink

This option should, however, probably always be called with the "delete" action. If both actions are listed, the "shrink" action will be called after the "delete" action:

ppdatamaintainer.exe --ppdata "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5\sessions.ppdata" --action delete shrink --deletedaysold 30

Automation

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