Is it save to delete ACT_HI_* table Content?

Camunda 7 Topics Discussion & Questions
1

Hi,

in previous workflows I deployed, the history time to live was not set. Therefore millions of rows were create which will never be removed by the cleanup job for history data.

Is it safe to drop the rows of the ACT_HI_* Tables or is there any other recomended way in doing this?

Generally I would rather set some value and the hourly cron job for history cleanup does the rest.

Thank you very much.

2

I would recommend to follow the Camunda Best practices. here is the link.

https://camunda.com/best-practices/cleaning-up-historical-data/

3

Hi @cnfg,

you can set the history time to live with this REST Api call: Update history time to live | docs.camunda.org

Hope this helps, Ingo

4

Thanks alot for the input, it was a hint in the right direction. What I ended up using was the POST /history/process-instance/delete in the following curl:

curl --location --request POST 'http://localhost:8080/engine-rest/history/process-instance/delete' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
  "deleteReason" : "Historic data is not needed",
  "historicProcessInstanceQuery": {
    "finished": "true"
  }
}'

Also Postman helps, if you have trouble using curl.

Pretty handy this REST-API :slight_smile: