OLTP or Online Transaction Processing databases and OLAP or Online Analytics Processing tools and data warehouses are widely used in data management applications and IT infrastructures. But as George Crump of Storage Switzerland points out in his Information Week blog post “Keeping Data Forever vs. Data Retention” the decision of what data to keep and when to purge it has always been a dilemma which has yet to be resolved.
As one person commented, the IT department should not be determining what data should be kept or removed. It is fundamentally a business decision based on compliance, regulatory requirements and usefulness of the data relative to the business. With the Big Data explosion occurring, disk space continues to get gobbled up faster than Pacman going after power pills. With compliance drivers such as the online availability of Electronic Health Care records for everyone here in the USA, you can be sure that IT departments and ISV providers serving this industry sector will be looking at ways to intelligently purge the data that is no longer required to be retained.
The question remains how can this be done based on configurable rules and how can you ensure compliance without significant changes to applications or custom code/scripts to execute these tasks.
This is where looking at companies which offer OLDR (Online Data Retention) comes into play.
If you could ensure that older, historical data can be retained and kept accessible online in limitless volumes, with purge capabilities only in order to reduce liabilities where needed. And as an added bonus, by removing the static data from your production applications or data warehouses, those systems get “younger” in that their indices get smaller and they run more efficiently without the need to add new hardware. In short, they return to their youthful original self before they got clogged up through the passage of time.
If you are a data management professional or a product manager in charge of applications generating lots of data in your OLTP and OLAP systems, you owe it to yourself (and your customers) to “get OLDR”.