Monthly Archives: April 2016

WatuPRO: Cleanup Database Space

By default WatuPRO stores every user’s answer to every question in your database. This allows us to show you this data any time and perform useful reports on it. As the time goes and you are collecting a lot of data from many users and quizzes, your database can become really big. This might be a problem if you are using a shared host or other way limited resources.

So here is what you can do. Have in mind that any solution that reduces data means this data will no longer be available to you and will no longer participate in reports.

When Your Database Is Already Large

If you have not prevented the database from growing and already have too much of it, you will need to clean it up. There are several options:

a) Deleting whole quizzes. If there are quizzes you no longer need, and don’t need the stats from them, you can simply delete them. This will save most space but obviously isn’t ideal in most cases.

b) Delete user submitted data on the quiz. You can save a lot of space by doing this. Go to Quizzes -> View Results and you’ll see a checkbox at the bottom: “Show me a button to cleanup all submitted data on this quiz.”. Click on it, then click on “Cleanup all data” button.
You can do this on every quiz on which you don’t need the data.

c) Blank out data on a quiz. Blanking out the data will save less DB space, but will leave the points, grades, percentage correct answers etc. This way most of your reports and stats will remain unchanged and you’ll still have less used DB space.

Preventing Too Much Data

As usual prevention is easier than cure. Depending on how much of the user submitted data you need, you have several options to reduce DB space usage:

a) Don’t store any data. This is configurable on per-quiz basis. You need to go to Edit Quiz -> Advanced Settings tab and select the following option:

” Don’t store any data / results of this quiz in the database. “

That’s it.

b) Automatically cleanup or blank out data. This option is global and affects all quizzes so be careful with it. It’s available on your WatuPRO Settings page:

cleanup

You can for example choose to cleanup only data older than 30 days, or 180 days etc.