Data Archiving 

Generally large amounts of database data is produced in the production system of a business application, which often times is reflected in a deterioration of system performance and an increased use of resources. Costs can also be negatively affected by large data volumes, since resources and efforts spent on database administration go up as a result.

Therefore, data from closed business processes, meaning data that is no longer needed in every day business, should be moved from the database, in order to gain a reduction in costs, and improve performance and system availability. Simply deleting this data is often not a valid option, due to legal data retention requirements. This means that the data has to be removed from the database and stored in such a way that it is always accessible for reading if necessary. This is the task of SAP Data Archiving, which allows you to removed data from the database and store it in a consistent and secure manner. The archived data is stored in a file system and from there can be moved to other, more cost efficient storage media.

Data archiving is an administrative task that must be performed regularly, particularly if you are facing fast growing data volumes. How often you archive largely depends on the growth rate of your database tables.

The technological foundation of data archiving is located in the SAP NetWeaver Application Server and is available in two different variations:

●      ADK-based Archiving - ADK-based archiving is used only by ABAP applications that employ ABAP archiving objects in their data archiving projects.

●      XML-based Archiving - XML-based archiving is employed for XML archiving objects that are used by ABAP applications with XML interfaces, and for archiving sets used by JAVA applications.

If you want to archive data using XML archiving objects, you can only do so if you are using SAP NetWeaver 7.0. For more details, see the corresponding documentation in the Help Portal under SAP NetWeaver  → SAP NetWeaver 2004s → Administrator’s Guide → Technical Operations Manual → General Administration Tasks → Data Archiving → XML-based Archiving.