Archiving#

Critical Manufacturing provides three archiving options, intended for long term data retention:

1. XML Material History Export – when a material is terminated, its history is exported to a set of XML files. XML files are text files which will still be readable many years from now. Critical Manufacturing MES provides a report which reads the XML files and displays the material history. Please refer to the section ODS XML Export for more information on how to configuring the XML Material History Export.
2. Database Partitioning – it’s possible to configure the system to create Operational Data Store (ODS) and Database Warehouse (DWH) partitions based on time. Partitions can be attached and detached very quickly.

3. Main entity tables export to XML – If partitioning is enabled for main entity tables, before dropping deprecated partitions, data from target partitions to drop is exported into XML files and can be read later on using a function generated automatically by Critical Manufacturing with the following name format:

4. [CoreDataModel|UserDataModel].[F_P_XMLToTable_T_<EntityName>]

   • e.g. [CoreDataModel].[F_P_XMLToTable_T_Material]

Besides, the algorithm to drop entity data partitions validates data exported before actually dropping any contents from entity tables. It performs the following operation:

select * from <entityTable> where partition=x

MINUS

select * from [CoreDataModel].[F_P_XMLToTable_T_<entityTable>]

and only if there are no missing rows exported then proceeds with the partition drop.

Both archiving concepts are described in the next image:

When using partitioning, as the data ages, the data can be moved to cheaper (and slower) medium storages. This concept is commonly referred to as Sliding Window and is described in the image below: