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We want to populate a DE using AMPscript on a landing page. The script may entire millions of rows during a period of time.

Is there a limit to that amount of rows DE can contain?

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  • We have had data extensions with more than 30 Million Records, may be describe your use case completely so that the community can answer better
    – Swati Mishra
    Commented Nov 11, 2020 at 10:35
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    Thanks @SwatiMishra, But I'm sure MC has a fix number somewhere...we shouldn't just guess what is the limitation of the DE.
    – yoni349
    Commented Nov 11, 2020 at 10:38
  • No, @yoni349 - there is now limit to the number of rows. As a data extension technically is a SQL table, same limitations (or lack of same) apply.
    – Lukas Lunow
    Commented Nov 11, 2020 at 10:51

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I remember seeing a Data extension with a billion rows, which leads me to believe there is no relevant technical limit.

The documentation just lists >100million as "extreme". Certainly that is not beneficial to performance, so this is not an encouragement to go crazy. It's possible though.

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.mc-apis.meta/mc-apis/optimizing_api_calls_and_data_structures_to_improve_performance_in_the_salesforce_marketing_cloud.htm

Something around 10-15 million wouldn't really worry me too much. the limits one reaches more frequently with DEs are less in pure storage, but more in the speed of imports, extracts, sql timeouts or script operations working with the DE. And here you can of course reach limits faster, which is usecase dependent.

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  • I agree with you, Jonas. I will also add the recommended width limit of 4000 characters, as described here - this is even more important than number of rows. Another vital details is ensuring proper indexing. Your primary key automatically becomes an index. So ensuring the data extension you use for lookups has the right indexes will improve the performance significantly.
    – Lukas Lunow
    Commented Nov 11, 2020 at 10:48
  • Thanks, yes very relevant. About indexing, you can find some details documented at a very unusual location: developer.salesforce.com/docs/… So making your data extensions SENDABLE when possible is a very good practice - even if you don't plan to send to them. You can notice a performance effect when you do that, tested that myself. Side-effect - a good thing in my opinion -is, this also connects them with contact deletion, which is purposefully blind for non-sendable DEs
    – Jonas Lamberty
    Commented Nov 11, 2020 at 11:19

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