miniDBA does not require a back end database of any kind to store data, as the storage is self contained. This reduces potential licensing costs and maintenance overhead of keeping the backing database monitored/de fragmented etc.
Historic data is written to files and stored by server and date. The files default locations are:
- miniDBA Desktop: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\miniDBA Desktop\logs
- miniDBA Server: C:\ProgramData\miniDBA Server\logs
These locations can be changed in the options for both miniDBA Desktop and miniDBA Server. The log files are deleted after 30 days and can be large is size, potentially around 1Gb per day, per server on a busy server.
The large size mostly stems from T-SQL execution plans being stored, which may be extremely large. Not every execution plan is stored as trivial ones may consume a lot of disk space and probably not likely to be interesting. Only T-SQL requests that have been executing for more than 1 second have their execution plans logged.
These log files are transferable between instances of miniDBA so you can copy them to any miniDBA Server or Desktop installation and they will be available to read. Note if you are using miniDBA Server all users will be able to read the logs that it is writing to so it is unlikely you will need to copy any log files to anywhere.