Time for DB Archiving in ECC... When is enough enough?

[Former Member]

Hi Basis experts,

I'm an ABAPer and I have a question about when (at what size) to archive db tables in ECC.

Currently, my system has a few standard SAP tables that have a very high entry count. A couple of the worst offenders are tables like LTAK/LTAP and MKPF/MSEG (transfer order and material document tables). These tables have entry counts of 60-100 MILLION records.

I don't know much about archiving but I can tell you that trying to SELECT from these tables is starting to SERIOUSLY hamper application run time. We're starting to resort to program re-writes just to get around some inevitable time-outs caused by these huge run times in our reports. 

So, my question is, at what point is enough enough? Should we be seriously thinking about archiving? Should we have been thinking about it a long time ago? How far beyond normal are these table sizes? What is a usual db entry count that you're going to start considering archiving in other systems?

Thanks for the help and the insight.

- Alex P.

[yakcinar]

Hello Alex,

Mostly archiving is done because of high DB size, high record counts like yours and high response time.

Business needs and legal obligations define the start time of the archiving. Determines how much data  (2 or 3 years data?) you will leave unarchived?

Archiving does not guarantee you for better response time. There will be decrease in DB size, table record counts but this does not mean response time will be better.

Archiving is not only writing the records to file system and deleting them from live DB. It needs tests for archived data on all related transactions, Reading archived data must be tested also. It must be handled like a project. 

There could be other reasons for bad run time. Did you investigate the other reasons also like  not enough hw resources, fragmantation, not running statistics, bad sql queries etc.

Regards,

Yuksel AKCINAR