Cleanup of Unnecessary Work items

[Former Member]

Hi All,

In our production system, we have table SWPNODELOG of size 236 GB & its growing rapidly. We checked  few snotes for housekeeping of unnecessary work items from system.

one of them was snote 49545, where its mentioned to use reports for deletion through reports RSWWWIDE and RSWWHIDE, also found snote 573656, where it is mentioned, It is NOT recommended you use report RSWWWIDE in a production system.

So, we are confused, what is best approach in terms of removing unwanted work items from system,to go with archiving or deletion with specific variant (like older than X days).

Also, in case, if our customer don't want to go with archiving, can we go with deletion approach, what are disadvantages of this ?

Pls provide your valuable response on this topic.

Regards,

Manish

[yakcinar]

Hello Manish,

SAP does not recommend to delete WORKITEMs in productions systems. Check below link.

Delete Work Item - SAP Business Workflow - SAP Library

We are archiving and then deleting WORKITEMs in our systems.

You can check

"Do not delete any business/audit relevant workflows even if no longer required. They form part of the object's history, and it's no good ending up with a document with a change log that says WF-BATCH and no workflow. Auditors won't be happy if they spot something like that."  from Mike Pokraka

Regards,

Yuksel AKCINAR

[pokrakam]

Good advice there.

Of course people try, and sometimes it can also go horribly wrong:

Believe me I have seen similar (though not quite as bad) 'oopses'.

These reports are provided for clearing test data, hence the big warning from SAP in the online help.

Some points I can add:

• Most of the WF system is pretty efficient with indexes that only target active workflows, so apart from eating space, sheer volume itself shouldn't affect your performance too much
• Archiving. Include object WORKITEM in your archiving strategy. You DO have an archiving strategy, right?
• At a functional level, your processes should be designed to complete. If not, you will be left with a bunch of workflows that will never be archived.

If the last point applies in your case, see

Regards,

Mike

[Former Member]

We are moving to HANA and we trying to get our WF tables smaller. We archive everything after 2 years. But, our tables are still quite large. To reduce the sizes more, we set this to 18 months, then archive. Still very large tables. I recommended that we could archive all WFs that are "completed" after 30,60, or 90 days, but some did not like that idea. Some didn't like the view from the archive vs actual wf log. Our SWWW_CONT table alone is like 3 billion records.

What is best practice for retention length of WFs before archiving?