Proposed Documentation Page: Recorder Database Managment for Beginners

Development
1

The official documentation already has an entry for Database which goes into some detail on installing and using SQLite, or alternative databases.

Would there be any interest if I were to develop a second document (page) at that same location, explaining how to manage the recorder database just using the existing HA GUI? In other words, a “Recorder Database for Dummies” page.

This is an area where beginner users can really shoot themselves in the foot. If you install HA taking all the defaults, you’ll soon fill up the Recorder database and kill your SD card. But not everyone is comfortable with databases and SQL.

Fortunately, HA offers a number of tools right in the GUI which allow you to see what’s going on (History) and clean things up (Recorder excludes and the recorder.purge and recorder.purge_entities.)

I’m proposing a page which lays out a way to use these tools to identify and exclude unnecessarily chatty entities from being recorded, then to clean up the residue in the database.

I don’t want to put any time into this if it’s already available somewhere, or already in the works, or if it’s just a bad idea for some reason.

Your thoughts?

5 Likes
2

More documentation is never a bad thing.

3

What’s the opposite of “hard pass” … hard accept?
In any case, yes, strongly in favour of this.

4

Thanks. I guess the next step would be: How?

I’ve never written HA documentation before. Presumably there’s a preferred development and approval process to get it linked on the “Documentation” page. Anybody know where to start?

5

Some more documentation on the Recorder/Database would be much appreciated!