Sometimes in a day-job, there are obvious choices. Things that shouldn’t even be a choice, because they are total no-brainers. They shine out bright and get the stakeholder support they deserve.
Then there’s the grey, dull world of archiving data in SAP. I hear great reasons for not archiving, and every single one is right. Yes, you read that correctly. I agree.
Archiving is a task on the periphery, we’ve got more important projects. It is extra work, takes the focus away from the big wins. It doesn’t directly show any savings either monetarily or indirectly through time saved. And it certainly isn’t cutting edge. Though the benefits can often outweigh the added work load to help in areas of reducing transactional issues, better planning for business requirements, improving access to historical data, and more.
Keep reading to learn about five solid reasons why you most definitely SHOULD archive.
1. Make your shiny HANA DB even shinier
Archiving mitigates memory and performance issues caused by large volumes of transaction data. Your user-community will know they can rely on consistent system response times. They’ll become more productive and likely reduce errors caused by rework – something the individuals in charge like to hear and always want more of!
SAP’s guide to system responsiveness states that there is a direct correlation between DB size and response time. Yes, even on SAP HANA. A million records might be quick to read from that whizzo HANA DB, but they still have to be processed by ABAP.
Users who know they have 10 seconds to wait before a report is created are more productive than those who have no idea if it is going to be 60 or 600 seconds. They’ll go and get a coffee instead!
2. Control the expanding DB waistline
Face it. Your database is never going to get any smaller. Especially not after those January sales figures have gone in! If you have a handle on your system’s archiving, you can have a more predictable increase of those Gigabytes and hardware costs.
Data expansion rates become controlled, handled and known so that long-term technical confidence and costs are maintained. This applies to cloud services especially because archiving and keeping the reports means you’ll see a clear expansion rate and be able to set out a 5-year infra plan. Just another thing to move into the known-knowns pile!
3. Keep the auditors happy
Archiving can help ensure your legal responsibilities are met, with minimal impact on the Business as Usual operations when audit or compliance checks are required. Keeping the data live is a way to fulfill your legal responsibilities by not deleting important audit-relevant documents and files. But the auditor doesn’t care that it takes an hour to get it out of the deep archive, they just want it to exist.
4. Greater data discovery
Having access to all that historical data can be critical to seeing business trends and enabling better business planning. Allowing for your entire data history to be kept rather than deleted doesn’t just save on expensive online storage hardware. If archived into mid-tier retrieval, it aids in new product development, long-term sales tracking/trending, and data mining.
Data is expensive to keep front and center, and for the most part, it doesn’t need to be instantly accessible. Utilize it, rather than deleting it.
5. High-quality testing only happens on high-quality data.
Make your testing more accurate and efficient. System copies and replications can be done more often because things like BDLS is faster when it only has 10 million records to process, instead of 100 million, because you didn’t archive.
If your production system is archived often and the unnecessary burden of old data is moved to a safe place, you can ensure any copy-back will only contain information which is going to make your tests better, not cloud the picture. Modern businesses are constantly changing to meet new demands, and their processes adapt. Frequent copies of your production system back to QA will feed back into more agile processes and more accurate testing.
Go Beyond Just Archiving
Along with archiving, there’s many more best practices you should be implementing to your SAP and IT landscape that will help address these areas of test coverage, audit and compliance, and change delivery. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about the tools and technology you can use to positively affect your SAP environment or request a demo here.
