Manual Record Deletion vs. Archiving

[Former Member]

Hi,

We have a good number of records that are no use to us and we'd like to remove them from our system. We have been going back and forth on whether to archive them or delete them manually. We are told to archive them all would take 3 months. Does anyone know the downsides of manually deleting the records or anything other pros and cons of the two methods?

Thanks,

~ Chris

[Former Member]

Thank you everyone,

I appreciate all the feedback. We are going to create an ABAP program that will all the user to enter the PIR and it will be deleted from the tables.

[Former Member]

Hi Chris,

It is the best practice to take Archival Backup of the records before deleting it. Here in MDM, Archive means that backup of records will be taken up for any future reference. So Archiving a Repository will not take more than 30 minutes.

So you should take backup of the records before deleting them.

For Deletion, You can chose any of the existing field as Flag and First do a mass Import to clear this Flag for all those records to be deleted. Then in another Mass Import you can Set this Flag with any value say 'X'. Then in Data Manager, by entering the selection Criteria as Last Changed on Date and Flag field, you can search all the records at once and delete those records all at once. It will not take more than 30 minutes to do so.

Thanks and Regards,

Ankush Bhardwaj

[former_member205403]

Archiving in MDM is totally different from Archiving records in other ECC system. But still you can create an archive file using a Mask. In this Mask you can put all the records which you want to delete from your repository. This the archive file will contain only those records which you wanted to delete. You can save this archive file for future references. Later on you can delete those unwanted records from your original repository.

The above is one way of achieving it, but by deleting you will also loose the history of those records from your repository. So, i would suggest you to create an additional Look up field. This look up field will contain values like "Active", "Deleted" and will act as flag to identify whether record is deleted or not. Later on you can assign "Deleted" value to this field for records which you want to delete.

This way you will be able to identify where record is active or deleted. In actual it will not delete the record and will preserve your master data history...

- Shiv

[Former Member]

Hi,

We need to delete 2,621 records and will have no use for them in the future.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Archiving is done as a backup but if you r too sure that the records r of no use then better delete them.

Regards,

Neethu Joy

[Former Member]

Hi,

Archiving is done as a backup but if you r too sure that the records r of no use then better delete them.

Regards,

Neethu Joy

[Former Member]

Hello,

Just take a archive of the repository and delete the records, we have deleted more than 35k records in batches of 5k and it didnt take more than 30mins for us. This might vary for your system configuration.

Regards,

Abhishek

[Former Member]

Hi Christopher,

Its always a good practise to archive the record before deleting it.

If you archive records it may take some hours but not month.

As explained by Abhishek you should archive the repository with name and date and then after you have a backup you can delete them .

As we store master records which are of great importance in a buisness and it is like an asset to a company its always good to take backup.

For archiving u need to go to console ->select the repository->from context menu select Archive repository.

Just for information approximately how many records you have in your repository?

Regards,

Neethu Joy

[Former Member]

Hello,

The decision will be based on whether you will need those records in the future or not.

Archive will just keep a reference of the records in the DB memory, while a delete will release the memory from DB.

Another option is to take an archive of the entire repository with a name and date, and delete the records from the repository.

So when ever you records the details, you can always un-archive the repository for details

Regards,

Abhishek