Today in this developing world, most of the enterprises are interested in using SAP R/3 as a platform for their business integration. The SAP R/3 is used in the huge amount by the business enterprises is stored. Data are updated with the old data in SAP enterprises. When data are updated, the old and unwanted data cannot be removed. To avoid problems such as data overflow, longer transaction processing times and performance degradation, SAP data archiving is introduced. It removes the unwanted and old data from the SAP database. The data/information is known as archived data and the archived data is stored in the offline location. It not only removes the data from the database, but also ensures the availability for business requirement.

Features of Data Archiving

The data Archiving provides the protection layer to the SAP database and solves the problem caused by large volume of data. The SAP users keep the minimum data to work efficient with database and servers. It ensures that SAP database contain only appropriate and current data to meet the requirement. It uses hardware components such as hard disk and memory to make efficient with the minimum disk space. Data Archiving reduces the maintenance cost and it also contains various procedures of SAP database like backup, recovery, and upgrade. It complies with statutory data retention rules and implemented in two ways.

Basic components

SAP enterprise system uses the SAP data archiving as a supporting tool and it also enables the user to control the size of the enterprise database. The capacity of the data archiving is provided in all modules by a centralized component. These components will deal with SAP data in the form of special object known as Archiving Objects.

Archiving Objects

The Archiving object is the important factor which is defined as the logical unit and obtains data from SAP data objects. The archived is done after when data object is combined. It initiates SAP Archiving to get the right tables and specifies the R/3 business objects. It defines different modules of sap system. Some of the Archiving objects are SAP Data Archiving, Archive Development Kit (ADK) and Archive Link.

Archiving Procedure

Archiving involves more procedures strategy. The SAP data archiving is the right recovery strategy. It finds the appropriate data for archiving and has knowledge regarding the business process involved in the enterprise. It identifies the database growth and simplifies the identified process. Data Archiving comprises three phase Archiving process. Data archiving will creates archive files, removes the archives data from the database and transfer the archived files to location outside of the SAP database.

Supportive Tools

SAP data archiving has supportive tools like SARA (SAP Archive Administration), DART (Data Retention Tool) and SARI (SAP Archive Information System). SAP archive administration (SARA) provides complete administration of the archiving schedules and manages the archiving sessions. It streamlines and simplifies the process through the Central command of archiving administration.

DART (Data Retention Tool) retains the enterprise information for a long period. It provides the functionality and it is capable of extracting the data. SAP archive information system provides retrieval capabilities against previous archived data. SARI requires the archive files to be loaded in new tables and in database. It is a standard tool delivered by SAP to facilitate the customized access of the archived data.