SAP Data Archiving

Data Archiving, in general means deleting the huge volumes of the data that is in the database to some file system or any third party storage system. The data stored in the file system might not be needed in regular day to day activities of the organisation. The data archived and kept in the file system or external storage for future reference.

As per as SAP is considers after certain point of time the data in the SAP needs to be archived from the system to maintain the system performance by reducing the database size. In SAP, archiving is also a service provided by SAP for the consistent removal of data objects from database tables of the SAP database, where all table entries that characterise a data object are written to an archive file outside the database.

You might have a question like in the modern age computing with high end memory availability, is the archiving still needed, the obvious answer is yes it is needed, for the simple reason that the amount of data getting recorded is ever increasing and also the rate of transaction growth of the organizations are increasing for most of the organizations around the globe.

Benefits of DATA Archiving

1.     Reduces the costs of memory by reducing the size of the database and also administration costs.

2.     Ensures cost efficient system upgrades and migration.

3.     Improved system performance due to shorter response time.

4.     Reduces the cost of maintenance and run of growing application infrastructure.

SAP Data Archiving Process Flow

SAP Data Archiving main involves three steps:

1.     Creating the Archive files.

2.     Run the delete programs.

3.      Store the archive files.

Creating the archive file and running the delete programs are the mandatory steps to follow for data archiving whereas storing the archive files is optional.

1.     Creating the Archive files

In this step, a new archive file is been created and data to be archived is sequentially written in it.  

2.     Run the delete programs

In this step, the delete programs are executed which deletes the data from the   SAP R/3 database, once the archived data is read successfully from the archive files.

The delete programs can be triggered manually or automatically.

3.     Store the Archive files

Here, the archive file with the archived data is moved to the third party storage system or copied to disk, etc. This can also be triggered manually or automatically.

Strategies followed by Organisation to Archived the Data:

Organisations use different kind of strategies to archive their data. there is no hard and fast rule that governs their strategies, its all depends on organisation policy and the Regulatory Requirements. For example there are several regulatory norms for the Banks which need to keep the transaction details at-least for 5 years. so in order to keep up the performance of the system they can archive the data after two years and keep them in the file systems.

There are some Organisation where the data will be archived on a moment when the transaction is closed. But the general practise for data archiving is to set up a condition and a time line and on that day all the transactions which fulfils the condition will be archived to the file system.