My previous post (Automation – Advanced Archiving) talks about auto deletion of unused workbooks. Overtime, 2/3 of workbooks are removed – both business and IT are happy about it : Business users have only active and useful assets in their Tableau portal. IT’s backup/restore is faster.
However I still found some active workbook’s size too big, for example can be 10G+ with extracts. Tableau server does not have any control to stop large size data source/workbook being published. Most of those large workbook’s perform badly anyway.
How to disencourge the bad behavior of publishing very large workbooks? How to govern disk size?
The answer is again deletion.
1. Delete large unused workbooks more aggressively
The best way to encourage smaller workbook size is to delete large workbooks more aggressively. For example, if your regular policy is to delete workbooks not used for 3 months. You can introduce size factor :
- Delete workbooks not used for 2 months if workbook size between 2G-5G
- Delete workbooks not used for 1 month if workbook size between 5G-10G
2. Delete very large active workbooks
Can you have policy to delete super large but actively used workbooks? It really depends on your corp policy and business-IT relationship. I have a policy to delete any workbooks with size larger than 10G daily – even it is actively used workbook. How it works?
- Business-IT agrees on the policy – no workbook can be larger than 10G on server. Unfortunately Tableau server does not have this feature so we have to have our own automation program runs hourly (can be daily) to delete any workbooks > 10G in size.
- Of course, any deletion notification will be sent to workbook owner with policy stated in the message.
3. How to handle the situation that workbook size gradually increasing to the enforced deletion threshold?
- A separate size alert would be necessary to let data source / workbook owner know that his or her workbook is inches away fromvbeing deleted so action can be taken by workbook owners.
Feel free to add your comments ….