Archiving and restoring data

TrueSight Server Automation - Data Warehouse provides a utility with which you can archive the reports data warehouse and restore archived data as necessary. The following topics explain how the utility works and how you can use it to archive and restore your data:

• Domains supported by the archive and restore utility
• Prerequisites for archive and restore
• Archiving data by using the console
• Archiving data by using TrueSight Server Automation jobs
• Viewing the status of an archival job
• Restoring data by using the console
• Rerunning a failed archival or restore session
• Stopping an archival or restore process

Data archival is a cleanup activity that moves unused (or rarely used) data from the reports data warehouse to a less expensive secondary storage location. For each domain, the database administrator determines the period after which data is rarely used and becomes an overhead expense and then uses the archival utility to move this unused data to a secondary storage location from which it can be retrieved in the future if the need arises.

You would archive data for the following reasons:

• Improve performance: As data in the reports data warehouse grows, a drop in the performance of extract, transform, and load (ETL) and reporting activities can occur. Data archival reduces data in primary storage and maintains its performance at an optimum level.

• Reduce storage and maintenance cost: Data that is no longer actively used is moved to a secondary storage location, which frees up space in the reports data warehouse and reduces maintenance and upgrade costs.

• Adhere to legal data retention policies: Many organizations follow legal data retention policies that require data to be archived for a period of time.

You can use one of the following methods to archive data:

•  By using the TrueSight Server Automation - Data Warehouse console — You can use the console to execute the archival process for one-time run and to view the detailed status of the archival process. However, you cannot schedule the archival process from the console.
•  By using TrueSight Server Automation jobs — You can use a TrueSight Server Automation job to run the archival process on specified servers. You can execute the job for one-time run or you can create a schedule for the job. You can view the progress of the archival job in the TrueSight Server Automation console. However, to view the detailed status of the archival job, you must use the TrueSight Server Automation - Data Warehouse console.