Many people do a little spring cleaning this time of year. For your home, it’s dusting, organizing, and rotating your wardrobe. Clients who use our BrightVine Data Link (BVDL) product might want to focus on a different kind of spring cleaning—clearing out old BVDL staging table data.
Staging tables are a set of custom tables within the Blackbaud CRM™ database that hold the import data when you are completing an import job. Clearing out these tables regularly is a best practice to ensure your system continues to function reliably and efficiently.
Did you know that we include a custom global change for our BrightVine Data Link customers that aids in clearing out old data from the staging tables in Blackbaud CRM™? This global change allows you to specify a date range and/or specific import jobs and delete all records from the BVDL staging tables that fall within the input parameters. To configure and run this global change, complete the following steps:
Navigate to Administration > Global Changes.
Click the green Add button.
Select the Delete BVDL Staging Data global change definition. Click OK.
Give your global change a Name, and then determine the parameters you would like to set.
For your date parameters, you have two options - relative dates and specific dates. The relative date option allows you to delete staging data based on a number of years, weeks, days, or months. The specific date option allows you to delete staging data based on a specific date range.
You also have the option to clean up staging data for all imports, one specific import, or a selection of imports.
Once you are satisfied with the parameters you have chosen, click Save.
To run the global change process, click Start Process. You can also choose Create job schedule to set up a recurring schedule for the global change.
For most organizations, it is best to run this global change either weekly or monthly on an automatic job schedule. However, the ideal scenario will depend heavily on how you use the BVDL. Here are a few things to consider when determining what is best for your organization.
If you do especially large imports (record count in the millions) or run many imports (at least several per week), run your cleanup more often. Daily or multiple times per week may even be appropriate.
If you only run small imports very infrequently, running the cleanup every other month or on an ad hoc basis might be appropriate.
Do you often need to review old staged records and exceptions? Then keep your delete-by-date further back—perhaps only delete records older than six months or a year.
Utilizing the relative date feature and a job schedule for the global change will allow you to automate the process, ensuring you stay up to date with your clean-up efforts. We strongly recommend this approach after you agree on a data retention limit with your team.
Start clearing out the cobwebs in your Blackbaud CRM™ database today, and connect with BrightVine for any questions on the Data Link or using the custom global change to clean up your staging tables.