The Approach to Implementing Information Lifecycle Management

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

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 typically set to the record's creation date. (An MO may have special business rules for setting this date, in which case, a different date may be used to set the initial ILM 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.

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. This allows DBAs to monitor partitions based on age and the value of this switch to evaluate data that may be ready to 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.

For each MO enabled for ILM, the product provides a batch process to review “old” records and an ILM eligibility algorithm that contains business logic to evaluate the record and mark it eligible for archiving or not. The following sections provide more information about the batch process and algorithm functionality.