Archiving and Purging

The term archiving describes the process of moving selected data from production to an archive environment while maintaining the referential integrity of the overall application.

The term purging describes the process of deleting data from production without storing the data in another environment. Similar to archiving, the purge process must not affect the referential integrity of the application.

The Archiving Engine refers to the tools and infrastructure that are required for archiving and purging production data. The concepts for archiving and purging are very similar, except that purged production data is not transferred to an archive database.