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Are bloated data stores slowing down your database applications? Database archivers can trim the fat, improve performance and protect historical data.
Although its value seems to be apparent, database archiving software remains a questionable proposition for many organizations. The benefits of database archiving are difficult to quantify, and the products offered by a handful of vendors are targeted at larger databases, so buying more hardware is still often the response to burgeoning databases. Growing databases can also create performance issues, and new regulations may require long-term retention of aging data. Database archiving software provides database and storage administrators with a new alternative, but are the rewards worth the risks?
Databases contain a firm's crown jewels, so organizations are averse to exposing these assets to relatively unknown products. But existing techniques can't keep up. Additional hardware doesn't address issues like extracting old or unneeded data from the database. Database tools can purge old data to resolve an immediate performance problem, but they don't automate the archiving process or create compliant data stores.
With app performance tied more closely to underlying database and storage architectures, firms need to identify what benefits they'll derive from a database archiving tool and what characteristics to look for. Database archiving vendors suggest that production databases ranging in size from 50GB to 200GB could benefit from database archiving software. Among the benefits of database archiving are:
- Improved app and/or database performance
- Decreased backup and restore times
- Less storage needed for test and development databases
- Ability to store infrequently accessed data on low-cost media
- Less time spent tuning performance
- Ability to store data on media that meets statutory requirements
- Reduced risk and time required for database and app upgrades
- Lower licensing costs for apps or databases tied to total CPU or storage usage
DBAs and storage administrators need to understand more than just the high-level benefits of database archiving software before introducing it into their environments. They also need to answer the following questions:
- What problems are you primarily trying to solve?
- How does the software initially archive the data and what controls does it provide?
- How does it maintain the referential integrity between production and archived data?
- Can users transparently access data located in either production or archived data stores?
- What happens when archived data is recalled and modified?
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