Without some form of maintenance, Summit databases will always grow. The application maintains an audit history of most data, so it is never removed; it just gets new versions. Even unaudited data is rarely deleted, just replaced. The effect is a consistent growth that frustrates Database Administrators, and scares the bean counters. Buying enterprise class, mirrored disks for a primary database, the multiple copies of the primary database and dump space is not cheap.

The solution is to remove some of the data that lives in the primary database. This is a scary proposition for users, who naturally hoard data ‘just in case’. Just throwing company data away is generally banned by most regulators, who need at least ten or fifteen years of history to be available. Any data that is archived from the primary database will need to be accessible somewhere.

With this in mind, here are five key questions about your archive requirements that you should answer before you start to evaluate any solutions:

1. What do I absolutely have to keep online?

Obviously some data can’t be deleted, or the system will break. You’ll need to keep live deals and market data online, but are deals that were cancelled 5 years ago still processed every day? Do you need to retain all 132 versions of that customer record in your main database?

2. How long do Auditors/Regulators require you to retain data?

This is likely to be somewhere between 7 and 15 years. Different jurisdictions will have different rules, and you’ll need to look at all of the territories that you operate in.

3. How quickly do you need to access archived data?

When the auditors request an extract, how fast do you need to be able to access the data. Do you want instant access, or can you wait a few days for tapes to make their way back from storage and be brought back online. Some regulators require that the data is available in the main trading system

4. How will you access the archived data?

If the data is in a database dump, will you have the software available to load the dump? If you converted from Sybase to Oracle 5 years ago, can you load dumps from 8 years ago? Are you looking to run FusionCaptial Summit against the dump – if so, will you have a suitable application server and software code available? If you are archiving to a separate database, or flat files, do you have software to read the data, or will you write it when you need it.

5. What does Storage cost?

To evaluate any immediate cost savings, you should have a pretty good idea of what it costs to keep data online. For organisations with outsourced IT infrastructure, the cost is often pretty easy to calculate – it will probably priced at a ‘per gigabyte, per month’ rate, with the rate varying depending on how fast/resilient the storage is.

 

If you have answers to these questions, you can evaluate options for archiving your data. Quite a few solutions may be rejected immediately, since they don’t fulfill an absolute requirement from users or regulators. Knowing what your storage costs are will let you set a budget for implementing any solution.

I would argue that the System Elegance archiver is a pretty good option ( but that shouldn’t be a surprise! ).