The Approach to Implementing Information Lifecycle Management

This section describes the product approach to implementing ILM for its maintenance objects (MOs).

Note: The term archiving is used to cover any of the possible steps an implementation may take in their data management strategy, including compression, moving to cheaper storage, and removing the data altogether.

Age is the starting point of the ILM product implementation for some of its high volume data. In general "old" records are considered eligible to be archived. In the product solution, maintenance objects (MOs) that are enabled for ILM have an ILM date on the primary table and the date is set to the record's creation date. For implementations that want to use ILM to manage the records in the MO, the ILM date is used for defining partitions for the primary table.

However, there are cases where a record's age is not the only factor in determining whether or not it is eligible to be archived. There may be some MOs where an old record is still 'in progress' or 'active' and should not be archived. There may be other MOs where certain records should never be archived. To evaluate archive eligibility using information other than the ILM date, the ILM enabled MOs include an ILM Archive switch that is used to explicitly mark records that have been evaluated and should be archived.

Evaluating records to determine their archive eligibility should still occur on “old” records. The expectation is that a large percentage of the old records will be eligible for archiving. The small number that may be ineligible could be updated with a more recent ILM date. This may cause the records to move into a different partition and can delay any further evaluation of those records until more time has passed.

The decision of how old a record is has to be performed before it is evaluated for archive eligibility. This can be determined by a system-wide setting, or uniquely for each maintenance object.

Note: The following information outlines the configuration for maintenance objects that support ILM in the product. This is not a complete summary of the process to implement Information Lifecycle Management. For more information about implementing Information Lifecycle Management, see the see the Oracle Utilities Application Framework: Database Administration Guide.
In order to implement ILM, the following requirements must be met:
There are additional configuration points to further define how ILM works within the product: