Archiving data – DB2 comes to the rescue (twice)

The majority of the data stored in many OLTP systems is relatively old. It doesn’t change much and may be referenced only rarely but must be retained for many years, usually to satisfy compliance or regulatory requirements. Keeping this data in the main database tables can cause Performance problems as well as an increase in Storage costs. We all know it should really be archived or at least moved to different tables than the more active rows. However the drive to implement new systems quickly usually means that implementing an archiving policy is either simply dropped or at best relegated to a later phase of Development which frequently never gets funding as it doesn’t show immediate and obvious value to the business. Up to now apart from a few products nothing has been available to assist, but in the last year or two DB2 has provided two alternative solutions to the Archiving problem. This session will describe how the DB2 Transparent Archiving feature introduced in DB2 11 for z/OS and the High Performance Storage Saver feature of the DB2 Accelerator for z/OS 3.1 and 4.1, both of which support DB2 10 for z/OS, can be used to automate the archiving of old data. Depending on what you need to do and how your data is organized it may even be possible to implement archiving into an existing system with little or no changes to the application code.