Reduce size of grafana.db

Grafana
1

Hi, my grafana.db file has grown to 17GB and im pretty sure its to do with versioning of provisioned dashboards.

if i dont need all the older data is there any safe way to remove anything older than a month?

im aware there may be a bug that is causing the increase but for now id just like to reduce the size of the DB before it fills the drive.

  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using? 6.3.5

  • What are you trying to achieve? reduce size of grafana db file

  • How are you trying to achieve it? by sqlite3

  • What happened? nothing yet

  • What did you expect to happen? reduce size of db

2

That does sound large!

There’s a setting that sets the number of dashboards to keep in version control: Configuration | Grafana Labs. You can try reducing that. Not sure if it will proactively delete older versions though.

3

Where Annotations is saved? It could be another point of reduce space

4

its only set to 20 and there are 24 dashboards so i wouldn’t have expected it to got to 17GB

5

a few test ones we dont use them.

6

sorry correction the default is 20 and it was commented out.

have changed it to 2 but after restarting the service not noticed any change in DB size.

7

Yeah…sounds like a bug of some sort. Can you “inspect” the database file and see which tables are taking so much space?

8

dashboard_versions row count was nearly 700k

but i gave up trying to get the size of all the tables when i realised sqlite is horrible to work with after years of oracle and sql server

9

Well I certainly don’t disagree with SQLite being less than ideal for larger-scale data storage…though I feel like you’ve probably been hit by a bug that may not be specific to SQLite.

I took a quick look at the Github issues page, and it looks like there are a couple of potential culprits - especially in older versions of Grafana. If it’s an option for you, the first thing I’d recommend is upgrading your Grafana version and seeing if that restores normal clean-up functionality. If you’re not in a position to upgrade, then you could do a manual clean of that table (filter on created timestamp and just delete all older rows from the table?)

10

hi yes i have seen those bugs that why i think it is to do with the versioned table.

my gripe with sqlite wasn’t that this was its fault just the difference in syntax when you used to pl/t-sql

i think i will move the DB file to a bigger partition until im in a position to upgrade as this is the safest option.

Thanks for you help.

1 Like
11

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