Configuration option for minimal data storage

Feedback
1

I have a server running in Germany and am currently evaluating the instance with our data security official (you may recall quite strict data privacy laws in the EU and in Germany in particular; see informational self-determination). We are concerned about the amount of data stored in the database, and would like to minimize this data…

Given that we don’t need an audit history, we think we have identified some non-essential records/fields, in particular:

  • table audits becomes unnecessary
  • *.deleteat: records can be deleted if non-zero value, but needs to cascade:
    • team.id to channels.teamid
    • channels.id to posts.channelid and channelmembers.channelid
    • users.id to posts.userid, channels.creatorid, channelmembers.userid and (as part of direct messages?) channels.name
    • posts.filenames references files on disk/AWS
  • sessions.deviceid, sessions.props might be superfluous anyway

(These are the obvious fields we’ve found at a first glance of the database structure, there may be more.)

Q1: Can I safely delete/truncate these fields or are there any internal checks (e.g. integrety checks) which will cause the application to panic when this information is missing?

Personally I would like to see an option which disables the audit log and enables a true deletion of things, but I can live with a cronjob which scrubs the database in regular intervals.

Q2: Would you welcome a pull-request for this, or do you think this is completely out of scope?

—Dominik

2

A1) The system is designed to keep a full audit history. Deleting rows may cause a panic when information is missing. We wouldn’t recommend doing this, but it’s your database.
A2) Out of scope

3

Sysadmin from Austria here. Having a similar issues, but we are still in evaluation phase. :slight_smile:

Our biggest issue is that files remain in the filesystem, after the posts were “deleted”.

This is definitely an issue that needs to be fixed in order to comply with European Privacy Laws…

@dmke do you still use mattermost? Feel like sharing your script/patches?