In this meeting it was surprising to get to know that some of the Key Transactional Databases has never had a data archiving policy defined.
In my opinion data archiving strategy should be a part of preventive maintenance activity for any firm. Database archiving solves a number of seemingly unrelated issues like improving performance and availability of resources, managing data retention policies and preserving database as long as required.
some of the benefits I can quickly list down are
Technical Benefits
- Improvement in database performance post-archiving
- Reduction of database size
- Reduction in time taken for backups and refreshes (and thus quick resolution of some tickets too...)
- Cost reduction for storage
Benefits for the Business
- Performance improvement of all applications
- Fewer occurrences of issues related to data corruption
- Single source of data and no data reconciliation errors
- Lower maintenance cost for the applications
Database archiving is an ongoing, continuous process not the one that is done periodically as in DB clean up.
Archiving strategies require one to work in planning such as classifying data. The sooner an organisation gets started with such a process the better is the preventive maintenance.
