Archive Development Kit 

Purpose

When you implement an SAP solution, data archiving has to be taken into account from the onset. As the amount of transaction and master data can expand rapidly during production operation, you have to consider how to control data growth. Often, data grows faster than technology can handle it (in terms of certain database limits, hard disk sizes, tape sizes, and so on). With data archiving, you can keep the size of the database under control and ensure long-term access to your data. Data no longer required for daily operations or accessed less frequently is moved from the database to archive files.

Data archiving should be a periodic process, planned and scheduled on a regular basis.

The Archive Development Kit (ADK), which is delivered with SAP NetWeaver, is the technical framework and basis for SAP’s data archiving solution. ADK is a development environment and an application program interface between SAP applications, the database, and the archive files where your data is stored. It is available in every standard mySAP.com e-business solution and is also used by SAP. ADK ensures that data archiving is independent of hardware and release changes and provides you with the tools you need for data archiving.

As of SAP Web Application Server 6.10 (SAP Web AS), ADK also supports Unicode. This means you can:

·        Archive data created in a system that supports Unicode

·        Develop data archiving solutions for a Unicode environment

·        Access both Unicode and non-Unicode archives

You do not have to convert your existing archive files.

Features

ADK includes:

·        Archive Administration functions

·        An application programming interface (API) you can use to develop your own archiving programs

The development of an archiving program is based on the definition of an Archiving Object, which specifies which tables comprise a business object. Archiving objects are complex objects of interdependent tables.

·        Archiving-specific function modules

This includes the ADK Interface and Class Interface function modules. You do not need to know the technical details of the archiving procedures, as they are localized in the function modules.

The data archiving functions provided by these function modules include:

¡        Automatic job scheduling

¡        File management using the SAP Content Management Infrastructure

¡        Automatic conversion of archived data

¡        Compression during archiving

¡        Connection to a storage system

¡        Ability to archive while system is running

¡        Access to individual data objects in the archive

·        Sample programs and documentation

 

See Also

Archiving Application Data (CA-ARC)