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Brian Schanen joined Autodesk in 2005 as a Product Designer and currently is a Customer Success Engineer for Autodesk’s Data Management products. Brian has taught at Autodesk University numerous times and has authored white papers on Vault and Productstream. He works with customers to implement a complete digital prototyping solution specializing in Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault and Productstream. Brian lives near Detroit, Michigan.
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Database Maintenance - Purging Versions in Vault
October 8, 2008, 09:38 PM Brian SchanenAs part of the ongoing care for Vault database, Administrators should be versed on the use of backup scripts, maintenance plans (database defragmentation) in addition to regular health checks which may include reviewing backup and vault logs and database size.
This last check can be an issue for some sites under strict controls for their data footprint or looking to extend the use of their current hardware in a prolific design environment. To address this, manual purging can be carried out at the end of the design cycle to periodically manage file versions. From Vault Explorer, you can right click any file and select Purge from the context menu.
In addition, from the ADMS Console, a purge can be run across all versions on a per-Vault basis. Right click on a database under Vaults and select Purge. Like the client side wizard, there are options for number of versions to keep, age of versions, and exclusions based on comments.
Finally, this can be scheduled to run as a batch operation month to month or as an Administrator sees fit. Much like the backup command line utility, the purge command is executed with a series of switches as indicated in the example below:
Connectivity.ADMSConsole.exe -Opurge –N<VaultName> –KEEPVERS<Number to keep> -MINAGE<Purge older than in days> -EXCLCMT<Exclude files with this comment> -VUadministrator –VP<Password for administrator> -S
Note that it is optional as to whether you put in one or all of the three purge options KEEPVERS, MINAGE and EXCLCMT. This script can then be added to a batch file *.bat and run from the Windows Task Scheduler similarly to your backup script (with lower frequency). Please refer to the ADMS Console Help, ‘Server Console’ chapter, ‘Command Line Server Console’ for more details.
It is worth noting that aggressive file purging is no substitute for the correct data storage plan and in fact may limit the version functionality in the design environment, but used sensibly this process can compliment your other maintenance tasks.
-Brian Schanen
Comments
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December 16, 2008 09:36 AM Cynthia Hilde
If I purge all versions of a file except lastest 3 but some of my assemblies are referencing version 5 because they have not been updated yet; what will happen? Will the purge continue and the assemblies be updated to the latest version? Will the purge fail? Thanks!
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