Business Requirements Analysis

It is important to devise a business strategy before archiving the data. First, you must identify the tables that you want to archive. This includes identifying all of the parent and child tables associated with the tables. Failing to identify all of the related tables can cause corruption to the database. Next, you must know exactly which data to archive. It is important to recognize which rows are safe to remove from the online tables. Remember to remove only the data that is not required to maintain the day-to-day business and reporting.

Consider PeopleSoft General Ledger as an example. General Ledger contains the greatest amount of data to be archived because it is the module where the majority of reporting is required. There are two sets of data types that need to be maintained: balance information and transactional information. Balance information is retained in the ledger records. You might require balance information for online and reporting purposes to be available for a three-year period. On the other hand, transactional data is maintained in the journal header and line tables. Suppose that you require only one year of transactional data to be retained in the system for online purposes, but three years to be retained for reporting purposes.

Any data beyond the above time frames for balances and transactions can be archived and be accessed through reports only. The data can be archived to history tables. If data were to be archived into history tables, the data would still be available online for reporting purposes. However, you could not view it through standard PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture pages without special configuration. In addition, reports would need to be modified to access the data in history tables. Moving archived data to secondary storage devices is generally used for long-term data retention. This option is preferred for data that is rarely retrieved, and secondary storage devices are usually used to satisfy legal requirements.