Information Lifecycle Management is a set of techniques and technologies available from Oracle that assist in managing the lifecycle of data to support business needs and minimize storage costs. The key to Information Lifecycle Management is working with the business to ensure that data that the business regards as active is available on appropriate hardware whilst data that is less active or dormant, in terms of business activity, is managed in an effective way in terms of storage costs.

Data in the product is added and updated by the business on an ongoing basis. Over time, this data grows and the business activity on individual data will vary with its timeliness, business activity and data retention policies. As data becomes less active in terms of the business, it needs to be stored in a cost-effective way to ensure cost minimization whilst allowing the business to access the data as needed for analysis or auditing purposes.

As the Oracle Database stores and manages data on an ongoing basis, therefore it is logical that Information Lifecycle Management uses the inbuilt facilities and various database options to offer effective storage management solutions to manage that data.

Once the customer is live, there are several tasks to be performed by the customer. These tasks include creation of future partition, apply compression on existing partitions, running monitor process to check archive data eligibility based on defined retention period, copy the archive data to the cloud object storage and when ready, drop the partition.

Oracle also provides monthly database storage reports which includes database storage size, high volume tables and some partitions information that will enable the customer to make the ILM-related decisions.

Customers will need to set up a batch stream for the 'Add Partition' job (K1-ILMAD) and the add sub-partition job (F1-ILMSV) on a monthly basis to ensure that new monthly partitions are created.

As of the 23C release, customers are no longer required to run the Add Partition (K1-ILMAD) batch process every month. Oracle automatically adds partition for entities, every month, on desired domains and schemas. Refer to Automated Monthly Database Partitions on the Oracle Cloud Application Update Readiness page for your cloud service for more information.

Customers will need to set up a batch stream for partition compression jobs for measurement tables (K1-ILMMC) and non-measurement tables (K1-ILMNC).

At this time, customers should simply ensure partitions are kept up to date for eventual archive.

Oracle recommends that customers should perform ILM testing in their Test environment before running ILM batch jobs in their Production environment.

Exclusions: WACS does not yet support ILM (i.e. W1 prefix tables are not partitioned).