What is the end result of falling to routinely purge historical data?
There are a number of factors that you should consider in making purge decisions.
As the amount of data that you have increases, more disk space is used and so exponentially so does the amount of resources required to do various tasks. This situation puts more resource pressure on your server and increases the amount of time that it takes to complete even routine tasks.
As an example, running history reports could end up taking a considerable amount of time which may end-up reducing overall staff productivity if people are constantly waiting for something to complete. Depending what kind of resource limiters are in place on your server, as time goes on this process could end-up bogging down your server.
While Retailers only keep about (2) two years of detailed history, I have found many instances over the years where some companies have many, many years of detailed history on file. In one recent example, a customer who wanted to upgrade was found to have over 25 years of detailed history on file. Not having purged this data before hand created and extended upgrade process.
Normally, it is best to schedule purging operations for times when there is no one using the application software. Generally, there are at least (4) four good reasons for this as follows:
1. Purging operations usually require a lot of CPU and memory usage. So if this is done during peak hours, it can bog down your server.
2. Some historical purging operations will hang and wait if it encounters a record that is in use. This artificially extends the amount of time required to complete the purging operation.
3. Data Corruption – f you are purging database files of tables that are updated as part of a posting operation, this could result in on or more of those operations hanging, failing to complete, and/or possible corrupting some of the data in your database.
4. Software upgrades – in order to help reduce time and cost on upgrades to newer software, it may be necessary to do considerable purging of data prior to starting the upgrade. Waiting to do this type of maintenance until crunch time can have much less that desirable outcome that you might want.
If you have questions about purging and file utility usage, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department.
– John