Determining the Archive Cycle

The most important figure that needs to be decided is the archive cycle or frequency. How often is data archived? Even if data is loaded daily, you may not want to run archiving on a daily cycle. It is often better to use a longer cycle, such as a week, a month, or even a quarter. This will increase the storage requirement to a cycle beyond the life expectancy, but it also makes the archiving more flexible, and gives you room to spread the load over more convenient times. Finally, you need to estimate the load that archiving will place on the system.

This is important to know accurately, as it tells you how much leeway you have in scheduling the archiving of a set of data. It also tells you when the process can be run. For example, if the archiving is to be on a monthly cycle, and archiving a month’s worth of data takes several hours, it is not likely that you can do the archiving during a normal overnight run. You may need to put it off to a weekend and use the daily scheduling time to get the job done.