The implementation of ILM for products based on Oracle Utilities Application Framework includes a combination of application and database configuration and requires Oracle Partitioning.

An underlying design principle of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework ILM implementation is the concept that the age of the data may not the only criterion used to determine when a record is able to be archived. There may be business rules that dictate that some records are still current and must not be archived yet.

ILM enabled objects have a combination of an ILM date and an ILM Archive Switch. The ILM date is used in conjunction with partitioning to group data by age. The ILM Archive Switch is set by a background process when the record meets the business rules specific to that Maintenance Object if the record is eligible to be archived. The ILM Archive Switch gives Database Administrators an easy method to check when all records in a partition meet the business criteria that make the partition eligible to be archived. If the ILM Archive Switch is set for all records, then the DBA can take the steps required to archive the partition.

Moving data between storage tiers takes advantage of the partitioning by ILM Date but does not require that the ILM Archive Switch is set. Oracle recommends using the Oracle Database ILM Assistant to assist with this process.