More than one maintenance object may be involved in an archive or purge task. A maintenance object only specifies the child tables that are maintained as part of a page maintenance application service. Therefore, multiple maintenance objects may need to be archived or purged together to ensure that records in all parent-child relationships are archived or purged at the same time.
A database process (DB process) allows you to specify a group of maintenance objects that are processed together for a purpose. In addition, you specify the parent-child constraints that link child maintenance object tables with their parent maintenance object tables within the DB process.
The DB process type specifies the purpose. The DB process types used with the Archive Engine are Archive and Purge:
- An Archive DB process is used to move production data to an Archive environment.
- A Purge DB process is used to delete production data.
Let's say our DB process purpose is archiving bills that were more than four years old. Not only do you need to archive records in tables defined under the BILL maintenance object, you also need to archive the related records in tables defined under the BILL SEG maintenance object and the FT maintenance object. Note the linkage constraints specified for BILL SEG and FT.
