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Mirth Connect Guide: The Data Pruner
In this Article
In our latest Mirth Connect Tutorial Series video we do an overview and demonstration of how to set up and effectively utilize the Data Pruner in Mirth Connect. We walk you through how to set it up at both the global and channel level and by the end of the tutorial you will be able to inform your company’s infrastructure and compliance teams on how the Data Pruner can be beneficial to your company by increasing channel speed and performance.
Why use the Data Pruner?
Even with the declining prices of hard disks and flash memory, not all organizations can afford to let their databases grow indefinitely. Having limited resources is one of the main factors as to why IT teams are reaching out to their interface engineers, in the attempt to track the trending usage in order to allocate the right amount of resources.
When database tables are allowed to grow the indices that are originally created to make lookups quick. End up not being as performant in the long run. Depending on the type of database used, if the table is not analyzed frequently enough, queries will not behave as expected – as those indices were originally optimized for a smaller set of data.
This can affect application performance in the form of slow database reads and make the message browser perform slower to query for messages. This can also be observed when using a database poller on a large table, causing a channel to appear to be running slow, when in fact, the table it is querying from is no longer optimized to poll from repeatedly in succession.
When data needs to be recovered during unexpected system outages, it is easier to migrate smaller datasets during disaster recovery. Along with having limited resources, migrating only the relevant data helps keep backups and replicas slim as well.
Finally, for regulatory compliance, organizations need to adhere to their federal, state, or local laws on how long all the specific data should be held onto.
How to take full advantage of the Data Pruner
The most important thing to know about the data pruner is that it must be enabled at the settings level and on a per-channel basis.
Plenty of interface engineers have assumed that because they set the data pruner in a channels summary tab, they were all set and their data would not be growing. This can become a problem quickly when a typical workflow is copying an existing interface without making changes to the previous channel’s settings. Because of this, infrastructure or DevOps engineers should make sure that the settings level data pruner is enabled and set based on their system requirements.
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