Using database archiving technology to solve performance degradation problem __ Database

using database archiving technology to solve performance degradation problem

Many database administrators encounter the confusion that the size of the database file is growing as the business progresses. This brings great difficulties to the database management, on the one hand, to provide more and more high-performance disk capacity for online business, on the other hand, the performance of the database is getting worse. A new technology of database archiving can solve this problem well.

　　What is a database archive

In short, the database archiving technology is a way to keep the scale of online database and provide stable database performance for user application. The practice is to migrate infrequently used data from the database to a near-line device and migrate data that is not used for long periods into a file format for archiving. As applications require, data is moved between online, near-line, and file documents, such as applications that require access to data from a long time ago, and its physical location is automatically moved to online devices at near-line devices. For the user's application, these are transparent, just as all data is stored on an online device without any impact on the database application (the schematic below).

　　

The database archive introduces the concept of information lifecycle management into application data management, can monitor, analyze and forecast the increase of data volume, use online database to identify and locate inactive data or completed business transactions at any time, and archive the long unused data, thus greatly reducing the size of activity data. The efficiency of applications such as databases can be greatly improved. Archived, even when the application itself is obsolete, can reuse its data while maintaining the ability to access archived data in real time.

Outerbay Corporation (already acquired by HP) is a well-known manufacturer in the field of database archiving, which provides three kinds of database archiving products: Relocator for online data archiving, packaging and archiving products to archive the database into files (. xsd or. xml format, a subset copy product provides the user with a copy of the database for testing.

There are significant differences with file archiving

First, the concept of archiving, as defined by the SNIa (Storage Network Industry association), is a consistent copy of the data collection that is typically used to permanently save transactions or apply state records. In general, archiving is typically used for auditing and analysis purposes, not for application recovery. Once archived, the originals of the files are generally deleted, and the files need to be recovered through the foreground operation. Ordinary file archiving can only operate on files, and archived files generally no longer change. And the database archive is different, the data after the archive still has the possibility of change, and will become the online activity data at any time.

Outerbay has two major competitors, Princeton Softech and Applimation. The former products are mainly designed for mainframe systems, and the resulting files are proprietary formats; the latter company is small and its products can effectively identify data that is less frequently accessed in the database and move it out of the database and into the online historical database.

In fact, all database vendors provide similar database archiving capabilities, but no commercial products are currently in place, and users can use commands or programs to perform related operations. The concept of database archiving itself is very simple, insert a record from the production database into the history database, and then delete the record in the production database to achieve the function of database archiving.

But online databases require advanced features such as high reliability, error handling, auditing, and exception handling (such as power outages, database crashes), which can only be provided by professional database archiving products.

　　impact on backup/restore

Backup is one of the most important tasks for storage administrators, and if you do not have a database archive, you need to not only back up the entire large database, but also the backup window is very long. After the data is archived, since archived portions of the database can be backed up at any time without affecting the application of the online database, which is typically a long, inactive data, the backup effort is easy to complete, and the online database is partly thin and backed up by a reduction in the amount of data being archived. The backup window decreases, thereby reducing the overall amount of data that needs to be backed up.

When the data is recovered, the online database recovery can be completed in a short time, and then the other data will be restored while working in the online database.

The database archiving market is still in its infancy, but some figures show that the composite growth rate of the current market has reached 50%, showing a trend of rapid growth.

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Recently has been slow to do a data archiving project, online data is really heartbreaking. When this project comes up with a series of technical problems, it often hurts and is happy. In this I would like to combine their own feelings, write experience one or two.

September 11, the United States Heartache Day, the WTO into ruins, why this matter after only a week, the World Trade Organization before the relevant business can be gradually run. The relevant data still exists. Data backup, that's it, it can accomplish such a task.

Since the 911 accident, large enterprises, financial institutions and so on to reflect on this issue, data on how to save human destruction, how to effectively backup to emergency situations. Later, some large enterprises in China to learn the World Trade Organization on data backup processing technology, because the cause of our country in this is a pure Arctic, resulting in asymmetric solutions, in turn to the enterprise to bring greater economic burden. The related solution not only solves the problem, but also causes the enterprise in this piece of data management confusion, brings is each year as the data unceasingly increases, the unceasing update, causes the existing system to be slow, more importantly is the backup system restores the data to be very slow. After this series of effects, data archiving is maturing and rational in the country, now as enterprise applications from the previous Application Center slowly into data-centric, data archiving began to sprout, the IT giants proposed a different solution. With the sound legal system of data management in China, some relevant data must be backed up to prevent future review and verification.

Over time, companies will have more and more business data in the online database, which may be long ago, and may be rarely visited, but it will make the database larger, large database tables, in the existing hardware environment caused performance degradation.

   from the above reasons, if the enterprise can adopt the appropriate data archiving program, enterprises can bring certain risk tolerance, can solve the database expansion caused by the decline in performance, but also for enterprises in the further use of business intelligence and other aspects to lay the foundation.