BESAuditTrailCleaner
Version: 3.0.9.56

Summary:
This tool is used to clear out historical data from the bfenterprise database that is stored to serve as an audit trail. This audit trail will grow slowly over the lifetime of a BES deployment. The audit trail contains deleted and previous VERSIONS of Fixlets, Tasks, Actions and Analyses.  The audit trail is not used by BES in any way and can be deleted to reduce the database size. BigFix recommends you create a historic archive of the current database and save it to a secure location before running this tool to preserve the audit trail, thus removing it from the product database but not completely deleting the history.

The tool can count and delete the following sets of data:

* Older Versions of Custom Authored Content - Every edit to Fixlets/Tasks/Baselines/Analyses creates a new version, the older VERSIONS can be deleted.

* Older Versions of Actions - Any time you stop or start and Action a new version is created, the older VERSIONS can be deleted.

* Deleted Custom Authored Content (all VERSIONS) - When you delete a Fixlet/Task/Besline/Analysis using the BES Console, the data is marked as deleted in the database and preserved.  The deleted content, including all of the previous VERSIONS, and the corresponding client reports can be deleted

* Deleted Actions (all VERSIONS) - When you delete an action using the BES Console, the data is marked as deleted in the database and preserved.  The deleted actions, including all of the previous VERSIONS, and the corresponding client reports can be deleted.

* Useless Action Results - Older VERSIONS of BigFix ( before 7.2.4.60 ) could cause BES Clients to report ActionResults which were not used in any way but would use up space in the database.  These useless ActionResults can be deleted.

Additional Information:

Batched deletion - Deleting large sets of data will lead to the SQL transaction log growing quickly, the log will temporarly be larger than the data being removed until the database is shrunk.  Batched deletion will remove results in sets and pause between each set, giving you time to shrink and reclaim disk space as you go.

Synchronizing BES Consoles - The BES Console maintains a local cache of the database that will become unsynchronized when data is removed with this tool. To prevent this from happening, the tool sets a flag the database to force all BES Consoles to re-load the cache on the next started up.



Command Line Arguments
Optional Arguments:
-h : Displays this help message
-? : Displays this help message
-help : Displays help message for installing this tool as a service.
-f : Runs in silent mode.  No standard output and script runs automatically to completion.
-l : Sends standard out to logfile created in the directory of this application with name BESAuditTrailCleaner.log
-L <Folder> : Specify a folder to create logs in. Do not include a file name.
-d <BES DSN> : Used to specify a DSN to connect to the BES Database with.  Defaults to bes_bfenterprise if not specified
-u <username> : Used to specify a username for SQL authentication to the database.
-p <password> : Used to specify a password for SQL authentication to the database.
-c : Do NOT count rows prior to deletion.
-S : Remove All Audit Trail data.
-v : Remove Older Versions of Custom Authored Content.
-V : Remove Older Versions of Actions.
-o : Remove Deleted Custom Authored Content.
-O : Remove Deleted Actions.
-t : Remove Useless Action Results.
-s : Synchronize BES Consoles (done automatically for any removal operation).
-b <batch size> : Performs database deletion operations in batches of this size. The tool will pause between batches until the user presses a key (unless run in silent mode with -f).",


Sample calls:
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -h
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -l
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -l -L "C:\Temp"
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -d database_dsn -u database_user -p database_password
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -S
BESAuditTrailCleaner.exe -S -b 1000000 -f