Data Archiving

A production system with business applications often generates large amounts of data on the database, which can lead to a deterioration of system performance and an increased use of resources. Growing data volumes can also have a negative effect on costs, due to the increased effort required to administer the database.

Removing data that is no longer needed in every day business from the database then is a strategy that can benefit the costs, performance and availability of your system. Simply deleting this data is often not an option, due to legal data retention requirements. Therefore, the data needs to be removed from the database and stored in such a way that it can still be read accessed if necessary. This can be achieved with SAP Data Archiving. It is a consistent and secure way for you to remove data from the database. The archived data is stored in a file system and from there can be moved to other, more cost efficient third party storage systems.

Data archiving is an administration task that should be performed regularly, at certain time intervals, depending on the growth rate of your database tables. 

Technical System Landscape

The technological basis of data archiving is part of the SAP Web Application Server and is available in two variations: ADK-based archiving and XML-based archiving. So far most of the archiving objects are available under the Archive Development Kit (ADK). Other archiving objects and archiving sets are available under XML-based Archiving. Both the ADK and XML Archive API provide basic functions and services for development and execution of archiving programs. In both cases Archive Administration is the main function for Customizing and running data archiving.

Tasks

The archiving process itself takes place in three steps. Step three "Accessing Archived Data" is not part of the archiving process itself, but it plays an important role with respect to how archived data can be used, and is therefore included in this document.

To facilitate the tasks of data archiving, the role "Data Archiving Administrator" is available in the SAP system. Its technical name is SAP_BC_CCM_DATA_ARCHIVING and can be called via role maintenance (transaction PFCG). The role offers the system or data archiving administrator direct access to all the information, tools, and systems necessary for data archiving.

 

       1.        Analysis

You must first determine which of your database tables are growing the fastest, and using this information you can select the archiving objects that would be the most beneficial for reducing the size of your system.

       2.      Archiving Data and Monitoring Archiving Activities

                            a.      Making the system settings necessary for data archiving

                            b.      Scheduling, controlling and monitoring archiving jobs

       3.      Accessing Archived Data

In this step you configure and perform the access to archived data.