The importance of data archiving

Growing data

Together with the natural growth of your business, the number of users of the system increases. It goes without saying that also the amount of data grows over time. In addition, your database expands when new functionalities are introduced, mergers or acquisitions take place or when you upgrade to a new version.

The system needs to be stored and you have to make a backup of all data. This can result in the need for additional hardware. A second consequence is that the more data in your tables, the slower the processes will be. More and more items in the system need to be taken into account when executing transactions. An example of this is when you execute queries: the speed is determined by the tables underneath and the amount of data in them.
Another disadvantage of very large data amounts is the time necessary to restore a backup.

Data archiving

Data archiving can be used to remove unnecessary data from your system. This can be data that is no longer required as online data, but that is still useful now and then. Data archiving removes the data from the active system, thus speeding up response times and enabling swifter processing times. Your system will transform into a much more productive production environment.
A second plus is that less space is needed to store the data: the size of the archiving files is much smaller than the size of the original ones. This has the added advantage that copies of the system and the archive files are also smaller. Restoring backups will take a considerably smaller amount of time.

The archived records can be stored in a secure manner. Several standard archiving components are available in SAP, but additional ones can be created. For the archiving of the files different solutions are on the market, e.g. OpenText.

During the implementation of the archiving process, it is possible to determine which files are no longer required, do not need a backup version, or can be deleted after a set amount of time. This can be due to irrelevancy of the files or because they need to be removed due to legal requirements (e.g. certain HR documents). These files can then be deleted from the system or archive store altogether.