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By W. Curtis Preston
There are a number of important data archiving best practices, but the most important ones (that are rarely followed) are simply to archive and to use data archiving software. Most people are using their backups as archives, and it's hard to imagine anything worse you could do if you have archiving requirements. But let's not put the cart before the horse; let's determine your requirements first.
Format Description for SIARD10 - An open format especially designed for archiving relational databases in a vendor-neutral form. A SIARD file is a ZIP-based archive of files that capture the structure and content of the database tables in XML, together with any BLOB and CLOB data objects.
Nov 01, 2018 Data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention. Archive data consists of older data that is still important to the organization and may be needed for future reference, as well as data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. Data archives are indexed. Read a description of Database Archiving Software. Free detailed reports on Database Archiving Software are also available. Solix Database archiving for Microsoft SQL has proven to be an ILM best pratcice to effectively manage data growth. It helps improve application perfromance, and compliance governing data retention while reducing storage and maintenance costs. Aug 01, 2010 Choosing data archiving software and other data archiving best practices There are a number of important data archiving best practices, but the most important ones (that are rarely followed) are simply to archive at all and to use data archiving software.
Depending on your industry, you may actually have no data archiving requirements. Financial trading houses are required to archive all communications with customers. Anyone subject to the United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) has serious long-term storage requirements, as they must store data beyond the life of the patient. Companies that are often subject to intellectual property/patent lawsuits may want to archive such material to prove that they did indeed come up with it first. The best thing to do here is to have meetings with the various stakeholders to ask them what their long-term storage requirements are. The legal department should also be present at each of these meetings to ensure that they run each request through the 'how could this hurt us?' filter.
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This is one of those areas where less is definitely more. I cannot state this any plainer than 'if you do not have an archiving requirement, don't archive.' Keeping data longer than you need to keep it can actually be more harmful than helpful -- especially if you live in the United States (the most litigious society in history). The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure guidelines state rather plainly that if you have it, you have to give it up. Imagine if you weren't required to store emails for several years, but you did it anyway. Even if your company has done nothing wrong, you have now created a tremendous burden on your storage department to supply this information to the plaintiff of the lawsuit. However, if your policy was to regularly purge this data, there would be nothing to supply.
Document your data retention policies
Once you've established what you're going to archive -- and more importantly what you're not going to archive -- you need to document your data retention practices. Document what you're keeping and not keeping, and what your data destruction policies are. For example, your policy could state that any data not subject to archiving requirements is kept for 180 days and then destroyed. Then you need to document adherence to this policy, which is more than just setting your backup retention settings to 180 days -- you need to delete the data. (Expired backup tapes are still discoverable; you will be required to scan them back into your backup system -- what a pain!)
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What I would do is write a script that looks for expired backup tapes and then relabels them. The first, last and only file on the tape will then be the ANSI label the backup software uses as an electronic label. Since it's the last file on the tape, just after it will be an end-of-data mark, which is impossible to get past with any tape drive or virtual tape drive. Therefore, while there is technically data on the rest of the tape, nothing can get to it. Translation: It's not discoverable. Document the policy, document the script, then document that you're using both by auditing the practice every so often and include that with the documentation. You really want to have your ducks in a row if you want to go into court and say that your backups aren't' discoverable after n days, but if you do what is suggested here, you should be fine.
Choosing data archiving software
Now that you've determined what you're going to archive, you need to determine how you're going to archive it. Let's go back to the first sentence in this article -- you need to use actual data archiving software. What is data
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archive software? It is software that allows you to search by different contexts than just server, application/directory, file name/email. That's all standard data backup software can do, grab a known file or email out of a known directory/application from a known server from one point in time. That is the only context it knows. Archive software, on the other hand, needs to be able to grab a series of emails/files from a number of applications/directories and a number of servers, from a large range of time -- potentially up to seven years. Some offerings in this space include products such as Autonomy Zantaz, Iron Mountain/Mimosa NearPoint and Symantec Corp. Enterprise Vault. There are also many other niche players in the data archive software market.
The difference between data backup and data archive software can best be seen in the difference between a restore (what you do with backup software) and a retrieval (what you do with archive software).
- A restore request might ask: 'Give me /home/curtis/thing.doc from elvis on 7/30/2010
- A restore request might ask: 'Give me a single email from Curtis with a subject line of Whatzamajigger from 7/25/2010'
- A retrieval request might ask: 'Give me all files of any kind, that were created between 7/1/2007 and 7/1/2010, on any server, with the words 'project bilko' in them'
- A retrieval request might ask: 'Give me all emails from Curtis to anyone outside the company written from 7/1/2003 and 7/1/2010 that contain the words 'promise,' or 'guarantee'
Do you see how different these requests are? Can you imagine satisfying either of the last two requests with standard backup software? If you were unlucky enough to have weekly full backups of your email system for the last seven years, you would have to perform 364 (52 x7) restores of your email system to extract the data that you need. In addition, backups of your email system can only be restored to the version of the email software you used at that time, which can only run on the version of the operating system you were using at that time, each of which had their own patch levels, etc. You do not want to go down this road. If you have an archiving requirement, you want to use data archiving software.
It is true that some backup software is starting to have archive retrieval capabilities, so you might want to talk to your backup software vendor before beginning your archiving search -- you may have what you need already! If not, however, you need to embark on a search for a proper email and/or filesystem archiving tool. Then remember to perform a full proof-of-concept test on any such tool before deploying it: They are not all created equal. Happy hunting.
About this author: W. Curtis Preston (a.k.a. 'Mr. Backup'), executive editor and independent backup expert, has been singularly focused on data backup and recovery for more than 15 years. From starting as a backup admin at a $35 billion dollar credit card company to being one of the most sought-after consultants, writers and speakers in this space, it's hard to find someone more focused on recovering lost data. He is the webmaster of BackupCentral.com, the author of hundreds of articles, and the books 'Backup and Recovery' and 'Using SANs and NAS.'
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) introduced today an improved version of its HP Database Archiving software that promises...
to put data archiving in the hands of the people who best know the applications -- business users.
The new version of the database archiving software comes equipped with a visual design tool that HP says will allow business people to quickly model their core business applications, such as purchase or sales orders, and put in the business rules upfront that govern the data as it moves from active to closed state.
The emphasis in data archiving has focused on performance, said Kevin O'Malley, product marketing manager for database archiving at HP. The IT department provides the underlying infrastructure to house a company's data, and when the volume of data causes performance problems, it falls to IT to figure out how best to park the data to improve operations. The HP software 'marries the infrastructure and business.'
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Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said he believes database archiving will be more broadly adopted going forward and become a 'core element' of the database management portfolio, given the explosion in data and data requirements.
'The combination of regulatory compliance requirements and internal information governance requirements will drive organizations to retain data longer,' Olofson said. 'Rather than retain it in the main database, with all the attendant issues that come from more complex database indexes and expensive storage, it makes sense for rarely accessed data to be put into some type of secondary storage.'
The HP archiving software is touted as a compliance tool. O'Malley said that about 80% to 90% of the data that accumulates in database systems is needed for reporting purposes rather than transactional purposes. If companies can do a better job of segregating the data rather than letting it just accumulate, archiving is no longer a knee-jerk reaction to poor performance, but policy driven.
The company says HP Database Archiving allows customers to meet compliance and e-discovery requirements by using open standards such as XML archiving for long-term data retention. For compliance and other reasons, it is important that data retains its business context as it ages. O'Malley said business users have been loath to move the data out from under the application for fear of losing this context and putting their companies at risk because the data is no longer in a centralized database.
'We made big improvements in XML archiving and the ability to get at the data. So, the data is removed from the database and in an XML document but from an end-user point of view, they still see it as in a database and as preserving that business context,' O'Malley said.
This helps customers lower their information management costs by storing the data independent of the application and database while retaining its business context for long-term storage and compliance, the company said. Organizations can leverage investments in existing enterprise reporting tools from business intelligence vendors for e-discovery reporting, while synchronizing with the archiving and retention product HP Integrated Archive Platform.
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Olofson agrees the archiving approach means companies can put the data in a place where the database management system doesn't need to manage it anymore, and at the same time allow the data to retain all the characteristics of the schema. Using file-based or disk-based archiving doesn't really do the job as well, he said, because recovering the particular data needed would require recovering the entire database. 'With an archiving solution, you can selectively cull out the data from five or six years past and they system can read it,' he said.
Lois Hughes, senior manager, business applications systems at Tektronix Inc., a Beaverton, Ore.-based supplier of sophisticated measuring and monitoring equipment, has used HP archiving software for more than a decade. She said she's 'really, really excited' about the new version. 'The XML archiving capabilities will enable us to decommission some of our older applications.'
Hughes went looking for an archiving system years ago, after moving from 486 global legacy instances to one instance of Oracle. She needed a system to help rationalize the various statutory requirements of Tektronix's many subsidiaries, which range from the U.S. requirement to keep documents for a maximum of seven years to 15 years for the company's China operations. 'I didn't want to have to maintain all transactions for 15 years, just because I needed them for 15 years for China.'
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'It is just going to be absolutely phenomenal. Up to this point, every time we do an upgrade, I had to have a full-time developer in place for archive support. With this, our users can manage most of them, with only DBA support,' Hughes said.
The biggest boon, she said, is that this software changes the paradigm for archiving. 'A user is not screaming, 'We need archiving, we need archiving.' They're saying, 'Give me all my data, give me all my data,' she said.
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The software handles the technical coding, so companies save money on developers. On the flip side, it is imperative that the business users really understand the application, as it moves from state to state, Hughes agreed.
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'You must know how long you have to save these documents,' and write the rules accordingly. She takes a hard line. When a user from Canada comes to her and wants to save data for 10 years, even though the statutory rule is seven years, 'I just tell them, I am sorry, you can have seven years -- and then point them to legal department and work with them to update that document accordingly.'
Other enhancements in the new version: The HP software also extends database coverage to include Microsoft SQL Server and provides new capabilities for Oracle, according to the company. In order to address the needs of more than 75% of the open database systems market, HP Database Archiving now supports SQL Server 2005 and provides extended capabilities for Oracle databases. Oracle customers using partitioning as part of their information management strategies can now use HP Database Archiving to archive complete sets of data spanning both partitioned and nonpartitioned, according to the press release.
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Independent software vendors and system integrators can use HP Database Archiving software, including HP Designer and a developer's kit, to quickly build and support integrations with third-party and custom applications.
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Let us know what you think about the story; email: Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer