Storage is cheap or should you purge?
Sometimes it makes sense to add storage as your data grows. However, it can be quite advantageous to consider the end-of-life of your data as well. This will limit your storage requirements and, planned in advance, will allow you to audit, keep records that have to be retained and purge non-functional data. This will give the added benefit of improving performance. For bespoke systems, this should form part of the design prinicples of the application, and we have recently introduced the ILM Assistant to help you take this approach together with a partitioning strategy.
For Oracle E-Business Suite, with its rich functionality, you will not be surprised to find that as well as supporting partitioning of the data we have a number of purge routines built into the application. There is a really good presentation on how partitioning and purging can help performance here:
Partitioning and Purging
One of the key system purges I would recommend is the purging of workflows and as this is probably a hot topic, here is a link to the
documentation outlining what we recommend for workflow:
Workflow documentation link
So it is a question of continually increasing storage and not worrying about archiving or planning for the end-of-life for significant data. There are arguments on both sides but hopefully these links will give you an introduction to what's available within Oracle to help you decide if partitioning and purging would work for you.
