yes, do a Keyword Search, there are already some postings there (in particular, on MSF900 and MSF200). But any more recent experience would be welcome.
Calator,
Thanks for your reply.
I've searched all threads about the MIMS archiving... and I read that the archiving process is not a good solution if we want to make the MIMS performance better. Am I right ?
My site is using MIMS OE 4.1 with Oracle 7.3.4, and being considering to do the archiving. So...what is the actual benefit of the archiving process except reducing the old/unused data ?
My experience with archiving is limited and I do not feel competent to advise you, apart from noting that I am not aware of any PRACTICAL advantages that could be derived from archiving of records according to MIMS's archiving solution.
Clients I have been working for have been reluctant to archive due to the fact that archived records are practically unusable outside MIMS and actually lost when upgrading MIMS (unless un-archived/converted/re-archived, but who would think to do THAT, it actually defeats its purpose!)
My personal opinion is that Mincom need to rethink their archiving solution, so that:
- records are archived in a format easily accessible outside MIMS(eg text) so that the value of historical records is not LOST, and they can still be accessed
- records can still be easily accessed from within MIMS once MIMS has been upgraded
Moekti,
Archiving provides limited benefits for performance unless you are doing a lot of queries that do not use 'Key' searches, requiring full table scans for the information. The other benefits are with saving of disk space, but this woiuld only be a benefit if you have hardware / budget constraints and you also perform database re-organisations to regain the space. Nowadays, hard disk technology is cheap enough to not warrant the effort. Although database re-organisations on a regular basis are recommended to keep the database de-fragmented.
Calator is correct in that with the Mincom archiving processes the data is archived into a virtually unusable form and needs to be unarchived / re-archived in the event of an upgrade.
The most likely area for benefits is obviously the MSF900 table, but a site I know about with a large database, recently performed the transfer of MSF900 to MSF901 / MSF902 and the performance benefits gained were negligable. In fact there is the other issue that any custom RDL's/programs may need to be re-written to find information that has been moved.
In conclusion, I believe the need to archive should be as a result of a business need. Not just because it is there.
I hope this helps a little.
Running on IBM
We have done archiving with the Journal Holding,Suppliers,Customers,Invoices,Stock Codes,Payroll.
Performance does improve, but really dependant upon amount of data/records you are holding
But you really are caught between a rock and a hard place with some of the modules.
1. Archiving in one version and restoring after you move to the next - not a good idea. Especially if Data Definitions have changed.
There is however the possibilty of restoring into the version that you archived from then running the conversion programs
2. MSF900 - problem arises if you have to use rebuld programs that use the 900 transactions for say Work Orders or Projects
3. So far have written RDL's to extract all the required info from the files that are being archived and stick it into an Access Database or the like.....but for some sites that most probably would achieve nothing.
I guess my advice would be if you don't have huge quantities of data and/or performance is not super-critical then DON"T archive.
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