The first part of implementing an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution for your Oracle Utilities products using the ILM functionality provided is to decide the business retention periods for your data.
Before discussing the first steps a couple of concepts need to be understood:
- Active Period - This is the period/data group where the business needs fast update access to the data. This is the period the data is actively used in the product by the business.
- Data Groups - These are the various stages the data is managed after the Active period and before archival. In these groups the ILM solution will use a combination of tiered storage solutions, partitioning and/or compression to realize cost savings.
- Archival - This is typically the final state of the data where it is either placed on non-disk related archival media (such as tape) or simply removed.
The goal of the first steps is to decide two major requirements for each ILM enabled object:
- How long the active period should be? In other words, how long the business needs access to update the data?
- How long the data needs to remain accessible to the business? In other words, how long to keep the data in the database, overall? Remember the data is still accessible by the business whilst it is in the database.
The decisions here are affected by a number of key considerations:
- How long for the business processes the data needs to be available for update - This can be how long the business needs to rebill or how long the update activity is allowed on a historical record. Remember this is the requirement for the BUSINESS to get update access.
- How long legally you need to be able to access the records - In each jurisdiction there will be legal and government requirements on how long data should be updated for? For example, there may be a government regulation around rebilling or how long a meter read can be available for change.
- The overall data retention periods are dictated by how long the business and legal requirements are for access to the data. This can be tricky as tax requirements vary from country to country. For example, in most countries the data needs to be available to tax authorities for say 7 years, in machine readable format. This does not mean it needs to be in the system for 7 years, it just needs to be available when requested. I have seen customers use tape storage, off site storage or even the old microfiche storage (that is showing my age!).
- Retention means that the data is available on the system even after update is no longer required. This means read only access is needed and the data can even be compressed to save storage and money. This is where the crossover to the technical aspects of the solution start to happen. Oracle calls these Data Groups where each group of data, based usually on date range, has different storage/compression/access characteristics. This can be expressed as a partition per data group to allow for physical separation of the data. You should remember that the data is still accessible but it is not on the same physical storage and location as the more active data.
Now the best way of starting this process is working with the business to decide the retention and active periods for the data. It is not as simple as a single conversation and may require some flexibility in designing the business part of the solution.
Once agreement has been reached the first part of the configuration in ILM is to update the Master Configuration for ILM with the retention periods agreed to for the active period. This will enable the business part of the process to be initiated. The ILM configuration will be on each object, in some cases subsets of objects, to set the retention period in days. This is used by the ILM batch jobs to decide when to assess the records for the next data groups.
There will be additional articles in this series which walk you through the ILM process.