Typically, 85% of data within production databases are inactive records. The cost of managing inactive data in this environment is significant and unnecessary. But many organisations take more effort in upgrading, tuning and maintaining production systems than in addressing the root cause of these problems by archiving historical data.

This paper examines the challenges posed by large and growing application databases and the business requirements that must be supported by complete database archiving solutions that relocate inactive data to specialised archive repositories. The benefits of such solutions are immediate and tangible, greatly improving application performance while reducing operational and storage costs.