Onelake Storage Report

Hi JVDA98​,

I agree with v-achippa​ that the cleanup is asynchronous, but there is one retention detail I would verify first.

time_travel_retention_cutoff_date is not the configured retention value. Microsoft documents it as the actual earliest point from which historical data is currently available, and that can differ from the configured period.

I would check both values with:

SELECT
    name,
    time_travel_retention_period_days,
    time_travel_retention_cutoff_date
FROM sys.databases;

The supported way to configure five days is:

ALTER DATABASE CURRENT
SET TIME_TRAVEL_RETENTION_PERIOD = 5 DAYS;

Microsoft covers the distinction in the Warehouse data retention documentation and the configuration guidance.

The amount of storage can also be much larger than the current table row count suggests. Fabric Warehouse retains historical versions created by inserts, updates and deletes, so stored procedures that repeatedly update large portions of those tables can generate a substantial amount of retained Parquet data.

Once the retention period is reduced, versions outside that window become eligible for background garbage collection, but Microsoft does not document an exact cleanup SLA. I would not manually remove the Warehouse files from OneLake.

Your storage report also shows about 192 GB already in Soft-delete. OneLake retains soft-deleted data for seven days, and that storage is still billed during the retention window. The OneLake storage report is also cached for eight hours, so I would refresh it after the Warehouse cleanup has had time to run.

If time_travel_retention_period_days definitely shows 5, the capacity has remained active, and files well beyond that retention window continue to remain after background cleanup, I think that would be worth taking to Microsoft Support rather than deleting anything manually.

One other limitation to keep in mind is that the retention setting is currently Warehouse-wide, not configurable per table.

AI-assisted drafting: AI was used to help structure and phrase this response. I reviewed and validated the technical content before posting.