Marketing Cloud Data Views - _Job and _Subscribers

Question

Do all data views purge data older than 6 months? If not, which ones do (or do not)?

I am mostly concerned with these data views, but if someone knows a definitive answer for all Data Views I think that would help to have future reference.

Data View: Sent
Data View: Open
Data View: Unsubscribe
Data View: Complaint
Data View: Click
Data View: Bounce
Data View: Subscribers
Data View: Job

By running a simple query on _Subscribers and _Job - it appear these two do NOT adhere to the 6 month retention. Is this an exception? Or the rule?

Answer 1

Yes, according to the official documentation on the Query Activity page.

Good luck getting any official clarification on details like that..

If you're wanting have more than 6 months of data in these views, I'd suggest mirroring them in your own set of Data Extensions using Query Activities and an Automation. I've found these views to be terribly slow once you get over 1M subscribers and have regular sends. In your own DEs you can define the Primary Keys, which helps in performance.

You can also back fill these mirrored Data Extensions by extracting Tracking Data and Importing it back in. You'll have to map the column names since they don't match the views (e.g. SendID = JobID).