Copilot conversation history stores your chat thread inside SqlDBM so you can revisit previous prompts, refine earlier work, or pick up where you left off. For teams with strict data handling requirements, the history can be disabled globally, in which case every Copilot session is stateless and nothing is retained. This article covers what the history stores, how to turn it off, and what users see when it’s off.
Who this is for: Account administrators, alternative administrators, security leads, and compliance teams deciding whether to enable Copilot chat history for their account. Also useful for end users who want to understand how to find and manage their own conversation history.
What conversation history stores
When conversation history is enabled, SqlDBM retains:
- Prompts you submit to Copilot.
- Copilot’s responses, including any diagrams or change proposals.
- Timestamps and the user who ran each prompt.
- The project and object context the prompt applied to.
History is scoped per user. Your history is visible only to you and to SqlDBM in the course of support; other users on the account cannot see your prompts or responses. Conversation history lives on SqlDBM infrastructure and is covered by the same SOC 2 controls as the rest of the platform.
What history does not store: any data from your connected Snowflake or Databricks database. Copilot operates on schema metadata inside SqlDBM, not on row-level data, so no live data ever passes through the conversation history.
The admin toggle: disabling history globally
Account administrators and alternative administrators can disable conversation history for the entire account with a single toggle:
- Open Account Settings from the top-right user menu.
- Navigate to AI Copilot settings.
- Locate the Chat History toggle.
- Toggle off. The change takes effect immediately for all users on the account.
When you turn history off, all existing conversation history is permanently deleted for all users on the account. This action cannot be undone. A confirmation dialog will ask you to acknowledge that deletion is permanent before the toggle takes effect. If your team needs to preserve specific past conversations, export them or copy important responses externally before flipping the toggle. This behavior is relevant for GDPR right-to-erasure compliance. Disabling the toggle constitutes a complete data deletion.
What users see when history is off
When the admin toggle is off, users see:
- The Copilot panel still works normally. Prompts still run. Responses still appear.
- When the user navigates away from the Copilot panel and returns, the conversation is gone. Each return to the panel is a clean slate.
- A small notice at the bottom of the panel explains that history is disabled by the administrator.
- The “View past conversations” link is hidden.
Users with ongoing long-running prompts (like a large reverse engineering run) should be aware that if they navigate away, they cannot recover the chat. The change or proposal itself lands in the project on approval (that part is not ephemeral) but the surrounding conversation is.
Use cases for turning history off
Teams commonly turn history off when:
- Regulated-industry data handling. Financial services, healthcare, and government teams often have policies requiring that vendor-stored conversational data be minimized.
- Early pilot testing. During initial evaluation, some teams prefer to run stateless to simplify their internal AI governance review.
- Shared workstations or kiosks. Environments where multiple users use the same login benefit from not persisting per-session context.
Teams commonly leave history on when:
- Users work on multi-day tasks where resuming the prior conversation is valuable.
- Team members train each other by walking through prior successful prompts.
- Long-running iteration is the norm (large reverse engineering projects, Data Vault buildouts).
User-level history management
Even when history is on, individual users can manage their own conversations:
- View past conversations. Click the conversation-list icon in the Copilot panel header to see your recent conversations.
- Rename a conversation. Hover over a conversation in the list and click the rename icon to label it for future reference.
- Delete a conversation. Hover and click the trash icon. Deletion is immediate and permanent. It cannot be undone.
- Start a new conversation. Click the new-conversation icon to start fresh without carrying prior context.
Related articles
- AI Security and Data Privacy
- Enabling Copilot for your account and users
- Getting started with Copilot