Archive obsolete data

The Purge Utility allows you to archive obsolete data older than 180 days.

Certain resources in PEM provide support for their logical deletion or soft deletion. This means the record is merely marked as deleted instead of being permanently deleted from the database. Depending on how frequently such resources are soft deleted, they might increase the database size enough to have a negative impact on the database operations and affect the overall system performance. The performance impact can be observed by the delayed response in the UI, increased database backup time, and so on.

Completed activities are another resource that play a key role in increasing the database size over a period. An activity has served its purpose once all its tasks have been completed by all the partners it was rolled out to. A completed activity only needs to be retained until you need them for your reporting and auditing requirements. After that, they only add to the database size and have an impact on database performance.

In archive mode, the purge utility moves obsolete data from tables in the primary schema, the ‘source schema’, into ‘archive tables’ within a ‘target schema’. The archive tables in either source or target schema are tables with names ending with “_H”. Optionally, you can choose to use the source schema as the target schema; however, it is recommended to use two separate schemas for the purpose.

The default behaviour of purge utility is to archive the obsolete data older than 180 days for the given sponsor.

The following Setup.cfg properties allow you to configure the purge utility to archive obsolete data older than 180 days:

Property	Value
purge.resource_to_purge	SPONSOR
purge.resource_to_purge_key	(no value)
purge.purge_strategy	ARCHIVE
purge.purge_strategy.data_scope	DELETED_DATA
purge.number_of_purge_days	180
purge.sponsor_context	<sponsor-context>
purge.target_db_is_same_as_source_db	false - to use different source and target database schemas. true - to use the same source and target database schemas.

Note: The resource_to_purge_key property is not required as the utility automatically picks up the required key using the sponsor_context property.

For a complete list of all configurable purge utility properties, see Configuration properties.