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Why Am I Over My Dynamics Storage Capacity? Common Data Service and Dataverse Capacity Review

Justin Languirand

Dec 16 2020

2 min read

Clients will often reach out with a request to refresh their Sandbox organization from a copy of Production. More often than not, it leads to the following conversation: “Jim, I attempted to copy production over sandbox, but your tenant is over the limit on data capacity.” Jim replies, “Is it from email attachments? We’ve been storing all of our attachments in SharePoint.”

Up until recently, storage was lumped together as one number with little to no visibility as to what was taking up space. Microsoft has expanded down one level to offer separate Database, File, and Log storage capacity. To see the breakdown, navigate to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com On the left menu, select Resources -> Capacity or skip that step by navigating to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/resources/capacity.

power platform storage capacity

storage capacity summary

As we start to analyze, we see that only 6 GB out of 20 GB of file is used, and attachments (stored in file) aren’t the culprit. Our Database is almost 6 GB over the limit.

Let’s find out why.

Keep in mind, this is the overall tenant level and next we will drill into the instance level.

Click on Storage capacity.

storage capacity

Click on the icon.

database usage

The production organization has the most usage and we will analyze it further. We can see database usage of 7.36 GB and a nice chart breaking down where the usage is. The Web Resource Base table is taking up the most space, followed by Activity Pointer Base, and this is what I would expect to see for table size in this organization.

Microsoft does allow us to drill even further though. By clicking on , in the top right corner of the chart, I get an option to export the tables and their size to CSV.

database usage
storage capacity tables
Web Resources consist of the JavaScript, html and other code in your Dynamics instance. I’m not aware of any way this could be reduced without removing functionality.

So, the conclusion is that additional storage will need to be purchased in order to refresh that Sandbox organization. I inquired further about the licensing with Microsoft and the storage capacity is at 10GB because this company has 28 users with Sales Professional licenses.

Only Enterprise user licenses accrue additional capacity.

default capacity per tenant

Feel free to reach out to our team at Sikich if you have any questions about managing your Dynamics or CDS Dataverse environments.

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About the Author

Justin Languirand

Solution Architect with a focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Data Integration (Scribe), Microsoft Dynamics GP, SQL Server, SSRS, SSIS, Jitterbit. Justin works with clients to transform data into information they use to run their businesses.