DB Pruner is the perfect utility to prepare for a Liferay upgrade!

The Liferay upgrade documentation says a best practice is to prune unnecessary data from your database before doing an upgrade. The reason this is a best practice is that the Liferay upgrade processes will typically at least verify but often update all of the records in the database. The more records you have, the longer the upgrade process will take to run. Cleaning out old and/or unnecessary records can shorten your upgrade time.

Although the documentation tells you it is a best practice to prune unused data, they don't tell you how to prune it properly (other than to invoke the Liferay API and never delete in the database directly).

This tool, however, does handle the pruning properly.

The DB Pruning Wizard is a control panel available for Liferay 6.2 CE, Liferay 6.2 EE, Liferay 7.0 CE, Liferay 7.0 DXP, Liferay 7.1 CE and Liferay 7.1 DXP which can prune data correctly. The following data can be pruned using the wizard:

* Unused Instances
* Unused Sites
* Older document versions.
* Older web content versions.
* Idle users (users that haven't logged in recently or have never logged in).
* Orphaned docs (documents that have DB records but are missing the corresponding filesystem assets).
* Recycle bins.
* User public and/or private layouts.
* Liferay audit records in the database.

Relevant configuration overrides can be done in the portal-ext.properties file per instructions on the wizard pages for the data to prune.

The DB Pruning Wizard can also be used to regularly reduce the database size by purging cruft from the database.

All DB pruning activities must be approved before changes are made to the database, and each area can skipped entirely.

So get this tool today and shrink your database to shorten your upgrade time!