Archiving is a great alternative to save your important (or unimportant data) in different important locations and save space at the same time.
Data Archiving allows a bunch of options. However, there are some of the prerequisites that are to be addressed. These include:
- Researching the legal requirements.
- Understanding the data usage.
- Thorough data evaluation and analysis.
- An adequate business case.
- Automating the data archiving process.
A lot of times, enterprises, in general, don’t have a proper data archiving strategy that could help them retain their existing data. This means that once data from old studies is gone, it is hard and very expensive to recreate that data.
However, archiving allows all kinds of organizations to search and access all kinds of data which keeps on adding value to the business over time. A common benefit of archiving is that it allows the organizations to save on expensive primary storage while retaining data important to the business, whether it may need to be accessed in the future or needs to be retained for regulatory compliance.
With growing data, the archived data becomes important, now more than ever for an effective data management strategy for organizations.
Archiving in SQL
Archiving in an SQL server requires a set of things to be followed. Since there is a partition of data made and then it is archived, it’s obvious that the whole process does require understanding.
The archive process starts by exporting the data from the source of data to a staging area where the database should be residing on a different SQL server.
To finalize the same archiving process, the exported data is further backed up.
Database administrators usually have abundant problems while trying to data archive tasks. A common challenge of archiving is the impact it could have on the database.
In most cases, the database admins need approvals and extra time to perform archiving or it could have considerable implications on the business.
Partitioning in SQL Server
For no data loss, the SQL server partition feature is a great alternative to improve the data archiving and not have any significant effect on the enterprises as well.
Partitioning helps to improve the reading performs and separates the rows into different buckets.
It represents the database operations where large tables are divided into several, smaller parts. When a large table is divided into multiple tables, only some of the data can run faster than before as there is less data to scan in one partition.
Partitioning provides the assistance in maintaining larger tables and reducing the overall time that is spent in reading and loading the data for different user operations.
Archiving the SQL server Data
A common method of archiving the SQL server data is to use the SWITCH command in the partition. To archive with this command, you have to create the same table structure in the filegroup as the partition that you are about to archive.
Following is the code:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[FactSales_Archive](
[ProductKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[OrderDateKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[DueDateKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[ShipDateKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[CustomerKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[PromotionKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[CurrencyKey] [int] NOT NULL,
[SalesAmount] [money] NOT NULL,
) ON [PRIMARY]A popular archiving technique with the data that includes the date and time information is just to archive data by a new window.
This could include a week, month, or even a year.
This kind of scenario is a simple explanation of designing with a particular target in mind as it becomes considerably easier to do in case our application considers the time where a query or a process happens.
Right from the beginning, we can scale using the time over just migrating the data from the database later on as we progress.