Importance of Data Purging
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::: Brief Introduction:::
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The term purge means to remove or erase something completely. Data purging is a process or activity mostly heard with Database technologies, i.e cleaning up of Database.
Any organization would expect or prefer to preserve all its historical data accumulated over a period of time for data mining and analysis, and there is always a finite amount of storage available to warehouse in those bits and bytes. When this data is not purged regularly, the tables in a database can grow so enormous that performance begins to deteriorate. So Purging activity is most important aspect of database performance tuning.
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:::Definition:::
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Data Purging is a process involving methods that permanently erase and remove data from a storage space.
There are many different techniques and strategies for data purging, which is often contrasted with data deletion. Deletion is more of a temporary process whereas Purging removes data permanently which in turn free’s up the storage and/or memory space for other uses.
Purging process lets you archive the data even though its removed from main source permanently, giving us an option to retrieve from archive in case there is a need for it. Deleting process also removes data permanently but doesn’t necessarily involve to keep a backup and generally involves on insignificant amounts of data.
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:::Need for Purging:::
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There are many reasons for doing this Purging activity, some of them being,
01. As databases are expanding at an uncontrollable rate, Storage and Retrieval is an issue.
02. Ever expanding database badly affects System performance and thereby efficiency of business.
03. Though data storage is relatively cheap, upgrading hardware is a very cost intensive activity.
04. For ensuring agility in case of disaster recovery.
Preserving historical data is important, but sooner or later available disk space or system performance becomes a subject of concern. A decision or choice has to be made between increasing the disk space or removing the data from the production database. While it is always possible to store an increasing amount of information, as more data is kept on the live system, more time is required for processing. It is important to find the right balance otherwise storage space and your processor size have to be continuously expanded, which could be a never ending activity.
The decision also has to be made keeping in mind the legal requirements determining, how long the data should be accessible, in addition to customer contractual agreements, Internal management rules etc. A compromise has to be made between reducing the size of the production database and the ease and speed of access to archived data.
The overall reduction of the size of the production database allows a greater flexibility when choosing various backup tools, a reduction in their cost and, at the same time, making the database easier to handle.
So, concluding, the Purging is the most imperative activity for increased user productivity, to bring down IT costs, for reducing DB maintenance by minimizing down time, for quicker database reporting process.
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