White Paper

Motion International Archive & Purge:

‘Having the best of both worlds…’
Document Sections

Document Sections .............................................................................................. 2

Executive Summary .............................................................................................. 3
Why Archive? ...................................................................................................... 4
The Client ........................................................................................................... 5
Why Motion International Archive & Purge Solution .................................................. 6
Motion International Step by Step Approach............................................................ 7
Step 1: Methodology and tools used.......................................................................................7
Step 2: Interdependencies........................................................................................................7
Step 3: Reports...........................................................................................................................7
Step 4: Legislative Requirements ............................................................................................7
Step 5: Relocation of Data........................................................................................................7
Step 6: System Performance ....................................................................................................8
Step 7: Implementation.............................................................................................................8
Step 8: Architecture...................................................................................................................8
Step 9: Oracle Upgrades and Patch........................................................................................8
Step 10: System Maintenance / Backup / Clone ....................................................................8
How Motion International Archive & Purge Solution Works ........................................ 9
Results Gained by the Investment Bank .................................................................10
Conclusion .........................................................................................................11

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Executive Summary

In order to maintain a competitve advantage organisations need comprehensive

enterprise solutions that dramatically improve business operations and drive rapid
return on investment.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a complete set of enterprise class business applications

that enable organisations to efficiently manage customer interactions, deliver
services, manufacture products, ship orders, collect payments and more – all from a
system built on a unified information architecture.

What happens to organisations when these enterprise systems become

unmanageable, inefficient and inundated with historical data adding unnecessary
costs to current infrastructure? This is the situation that many organisations are
facing: the necessity to archive and purge historical data.

Motion International has a proven solution:

Motion International Archive & Purge: ‘Having the best of both worlds…’

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Why Archive?

In all large companies users access an enormous amount of transactional and

relational data on a daily basis, most of which could be archived. Certain information
becomes obsolete in a relatively short time but is constantly available on line.

A saturated database reduces the performance of the IT system implemented,

resulting in:

• Slower
• online enquiries
• reports
• back-up/restore

• Higher costs of:

• dedicated resources
• hardware (storage, CPU, RAM)

Alternatively, it is often necessary to guarantee users with easy access to historical

data in order to comply with local regulations.

Motion International Archive & Purge Solution is the solution suggested to those
companies that have implemented Oracle eBusiness Suite and intend to archive a
part of their obsolete data, without losing the possibility of online access and
enhance their system performance.

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The Client

Motion International client is the investment bank of one of the most important
banking groups in Italy and among the 50 largest banks in the world. The bank’s
mission is to offer complex financial solutions aimed at helping company growth as
well as highly personalized investment solutions for institutional investors.

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Why Motion International Archive & Purge Solution

The Client has been using Oracle Applications since 1996 and their database
contains significant obsolete data from previous years no longer needed online on a
day-to-day basis. However, users still require online access to historical data,
Comment [MD1]: In the US, lets
because of fiscal and local legislative requirements. use “Federal” instead of “Fiscal”

The overall size of their database was 100 Gigabytes, of which nearly 64GB was GL
data, with between 800,000 and 1,300,000 journal lines being added monthly,
together with nearly 3,000,000 balances.

What they wanted was to have the ‘best of both worlds’, therefore they needed:

• Data archived and purged out of the main set of books, resulting in improved
system performance and allowing them faster and more efficient backup and
system maintenance.

• Historical data still available online on demand and accessible in the same
Oracle Applications Database.

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Motion International Step by Step Approach

Step 1: Methodology and tools used

The Oracle-approved method of removing transaction data from an Oracle e-
Business suite database is to use the ‘Purge’ element of the standard Archive and
Purge tools that Oracle supplies for individual modules. Any other form of deletion
risks compromising module integrity and support for the installation. However, the
management of archive and purge routines within Oracle is complex and inflexible.

Step 2: Interdependencies
Oracle’s standard Archive and Purge routines are discrete by module. They are
standalone, and are launched in their standard form by a responsibility. Archiving
and purging of all modules is generally conducted in the same timeframe, thus
ensuring that all d rill-downs and relationships between modules are consistent.

Step 3: Reports
The reproduction of reports requires data to be available in its original format with
the original table names. Motion International’ Archive and Purge solution allows for
this by storing th e ‘original format’ relating specifically to the ‘original source’ from
which the report was produced.

Step 4: Legislative Requirements

Complying with legislative requirements, archived data needs to be available in its
original form. Therefore, Motion International’ Archive and Purge solution retains
the ability to make available data subject to purge in its original form.

Step 5: Relocation of Data

The archived data is relocated to a separate online read-only archive where it can
be accessed as and when required via standard Oracle Application Forms and
Reports.

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 Step 6: System Performance
Archiving and purging data does not reduce the physical size of the database. What
occurs is that space is released within tables creating ‘gaps’ allowing for new data.
Similarly, indexes maintain their size but will be premised on fewer rows. Therefore,
system performance will improve slightly. However, once the tables involved are
compacted and indexes rebuilt then performance is greatly enhanced.

Step 7: Implementation
The infrastructure for the Motion International’ Archive and Purge solution can be
set up in a few hours. Time to deploy is dependent on the amount and range of
data to be archived. The Motion International ’ Intelligent Archive Manager allows
the concurrent jobs that perform the work to be tailored and scheduled optimally for
the client.

Step 8: Architecture
Motion International’ Archive and Purge is platform-independent, therefore it is not
dependent on the client’s current architecture.

Step 9: Oracle Upgrades and Patch

Any changes ne cessary for archived data through Oracle patches and upgrades are
applied offline to previously archived data keeping it consistent with current Oracle
Application data, without adding any immediate overhead or downtime to such
operations themselves. Motion International scans for patches where such offline
operations might be necessary.

Step 10: System Maintenance / Backup / Clone

The time required for completing a backup and copy is related to the size of the
database. Therefore, with the database reduced in size, h t e time required to
perform these tasks will be reduced accordingly.

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How Motion International Archive & Purge Solution Works

• The Archive & Purge is based on the standard Oracle-supplied routines for each
module, ensuring Oracle Support.

• Data is removed from Oracle Applications, utilizing an intelligent ‘Archive

Manager’.

• Archived data stays online, and is fully available to standard forms and reports in
read -only mode.

• Access to the archived data is responsibility-based.

• Archived data can be quickly moved to another database, but still accessed from
the original Oracle Applications database.

• To reduce storage costs, ‘archived data’ can be directed to cheaper disks.

• Archived data can be saved to tape and recalled using exports/imports.

The following diagram illustrates how this process works:

‘Archived’
Oracle ‘Active’ Oracle

GL AP GL AP
PO PO

AR PA AR PA
CM FA CM FA
Data transferred
to Tape

On -going Archiving

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Results Gained by the Investment Bank

Before the Motion International’ Archive and Purge implementation, the

Investment Bank’s production database was 100GB in size, all of it
Read-Write data that needed backing up daily.

Immediately after the Motion International’ Archive and Purge, the

database was still 100GB in size, however 40GB of data had been
archived, and moved to Read-Only tablespaces. Since the tablespaces
cannot change, they only need to be backed-up once, so the Read-Write
element of the database for administration and maintenance (regular
backup, cloning operations) was reduced from 100GB to 60GB.

The 40GB of Read-Only data forming the archived data was moved to a
general historical database on another server, using much cheaper
disks, and freeing up 40GB of expensive disk storage on the production
server.

The standard Oracle Applications tables and their associated indexes,

with 40GB of data having been removed, were compacted and rebuilt,
yielding significant performance improvements in use of standard forms
and reports by the user community.

Users have access to data for the current and immediately prior year via
the standard responsibilities. For data before this, they connect using
the corresponding archive responsibility.

Utilizing the Motion International’ Archive and Purge solution, the

Investment Bank will archive one financial year annually which will retain
the current and prior years online only, thus keeping system
performance and storage requirements to an optimal level.

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Conclusion

Motion International answered the Client’s requirements by providing the best of

both worlds.

The removal of redundant historic data was executed effectively and the archived
data was retained online. Moreover, all archived data is available via standard
Oracle Applica tions forms and reports resulting in no additional user training
required.

Motion International solution to archive and purge is effective, and cost efficient
giving organizations:

• A cleaner, more managable and efficient database

• Enhanced performance for reporting and processing
• Improved response times for manual transactions
• Increased longevity of hardware due to reduced storage requirements
• All fiscal requirements met by having data still viewable online .

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