RE: Long-Term Archiving

Uwe,

This to me is more of an Application Requirement than a database one. If I were told that we needed to keep data for 10 years, then I would push for Application changes to keep the data on-line in the database and not archive it anyplace. Simple(in relative terms) end of year processing could "capture" end of year data and store it into archive tables within the database. To me, it's just another cost of doing business.

I would not take the risk of exporting and "hoping" that I could import it one day in the distant future. All of the suggestions are good ones if you absolutely need to remove the data from the database (because of limited disk space). But I would declare it a "Business Need" and lobby the company to purchase more disk and keep it within the database.

Just my 2 cents.

Tom

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Uwe Küchler Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 4:25 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Long-Term Archiving

Hello fellowship of the Oracle,

due to not so recent changes in
European and German law, many companies, particularly in the financial sector, have the need to archive critical data over a long period, like 6 to 10 years.
BUT - simply using RMan or Export doesn't always suit the requirement to be able to restore data after several years. Just
think about an RMan Backup of a 9i DB that you need to restore in 10 years - we're probably at Oracle 16 or whatever, then and you probably won't be able to restore your old data to this new version. Keeping a copy of the old Oracle binaries is not the best option, either; maybe you won't have the appropriate OS version or hardware handy, then.

So I'd like
to ask the community what kind of solutions you recommend to your customers / managers, when they ask you: "How can we retrieve our data after 10 years if there is a tax audit?"

I've heard,
but haven't found a reliable pointer yet, that Oracle will support backward compatibility of the export dump format throughout the next versions. In this case, a regular snapshot of data by exporting it might be an idea. What are your thoughts on that?

Best regards from
Germany,
Uwe

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Dec 10 2008 - 08:41:06 CST