Why is there so much data written to the visitor_sessions table?

Environment

Oracle Cloud Service - all releases

Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud

Resolution

The visitor_sessions table, along with the visitor_events, visitor_offers and visitor_pages tables, is a table that captures data when a customer enables Engagement Engine and deploys an Engagement Engine tag on his pages.

Anytime an end-user accesses a page where the Engagement Engine tag is present, data is sent to the Visitor Service which then populates the data into the above tables.

This means the number of hits will increase along with the hits on the end-user pages, regardless of whether Engagement Engine rules are actually active or triggered on those specific pages.

The number of entries may reach 400.000-500.000 on a 24 hours timeframe.

Apart from optimizing the data being stored in the visitor_sessions table by modifying the configuration settings mentioned in Optimizing visitor_sessions table , another way to make sure the table is not storing too much data is to review the pages where the Engagement Engine tag is deployed.

For instance, if there is a lot of traffic to the home page on the customer portal, but there is no need to add chat or Engagement Engine rules on that page, a good practice would be to remove the Engagement Engine tag from this page, so that the hits are not stored in the visitor_sessions table.