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Once Inbox Accounting has been enabled,

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it's really crucial that we perform some maintenance tasks right off the bat.

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To begin, we need to run the command, Optimize‑InboxAccountingDatabase.

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Running this command simply makes a change to the database that is helpful for,

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usually for busier deployments,

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but I like to do this on all deployments just for good measure.

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Essentially, the Inbox Accounting database,

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as I'd mentioned before, is a SQL database.

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It's actually missing a crucial index on one of the tables that can

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cause performance issues and memory‑consumption issues,

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and also high CPU‑utilization issues.

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This command, Optimize‑InboxAccountingDatabase,

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adds that index back to that table,

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and then you won't have this problem in the future.

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By the way,

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this affects, all versions of Windows all the way back to Windows Server 2012,

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all the way through Windows Server 2022,

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this is still a problem, and so if you're going to enable Inbox Accounting,

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I would strongly encourage you to run this command so that

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you don't have those challenges and issues.

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So a couple of other commands that I want to point out,

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you can actually view the size of the database by

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running Get‑InboxAccountingDatabaseSize,

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and here, you'll see that the default is about 12+MB.

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Now, again, this database contains no data,

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but you'll notice that if I run the Compress‑InboxAccountingDatabase command,

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immediately, I recover nearly 10MB, 9MB of data here.

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So you can see that this database is terribly inefficient.

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This command, I would encourage you to run on a regular basis,

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probably run it as a scheduled task.

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That way,

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you know that your database is always consuming the

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least amount of disk space possible.

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The next command I want to demonstrate is actually backing up the database.

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So we want to do this periodically as well because if we lose a server,

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we don't want to lose this valuable user activity

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data that we've been recording.

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The command to do that is just simply

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Backup‑InboxAccountingDatabase. And when you run this command by default,

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it just places it in the default folder of C:\Windows\DirectAccess\db\.

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And there, you see our file backup.

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Also to better demonstrate reporting,

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I'm going to import a database that has more user data in it.

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So we'll run the command, Restore‑InboxAccountingDatabase,

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and we'll specify the backup file.

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And then once that's complete,

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I should be able to generate a report for historical data.

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So I'm going to set my start date to something a little bit older.

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Let's go back to February or so.

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Let's see who was accessing for the month of February.

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So I'll choose that and the 28, so from the 1st to the 28th.

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We'll click Generate, and here,

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you'll see I have all kinds of data in this database.

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Now, this is my lab so it's not really exciting.

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There are only one or two different users in here, but you get the idea.

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I can go back and look at a connection and see historical data,

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so what was the user accessing, who was the user,

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and various information.

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And once again, much like I demonstrated in the previous lesson,

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you can add and remove columns here.

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So you can always regain some space by taking some columns that

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you don't need and adding more important information for

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columns that you do want to display.

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One of the things that I like about this as well is

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that you can also do a search, and the search is actually on the reported data.

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So I've generated a report for this month of February,

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and I want to see all the users who are Rick Deckard here,

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and so then I can hit Enter and see all of the

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sessions that this user had generated.

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And again, I can see detailed information down here in the lower panes,

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or I can double‑click on a connection and gather this information as well.

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So as you saw,

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the default location for the DirectAccess database is in on the C:\ drive,

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so that's probably okay for smaller deployments,

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but if you're expecting a lot of concurrent connections,

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a lot of sessions, and you want to store data for extended periods of time,

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perhaps having the database on the C:\ drive is less than ideal.

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Now, as I'd mentioned before, we can relocate the database using my tools,

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but it is not formally supported by Microsoft so once again use caution here.

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Now, what I'm going to do is just run the command, Move‑InboxAccountingDatabase.

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The source path does not have to be specified because by default,

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it will find the original files in the original location.

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So if this is the first time you're moving it,

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it's going to be in the default location,

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so you don't need ‑SourcePath, but you do have to specify a destination path.

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And in this case,

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I'm going to put it on the D:\ drive, and I'm going to use the

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same folder structure as we use on the C:\ drive.

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Once that's done,

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my database has been moved to the D volume, and of course, now I'm going to

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have better performance and obviously have much more disk space so that I can increase my storage times if I need to do that.