Aiming to make database archiving easier for enterprises, Princeton Softech Inc. is planning to launch new application-specific versions of its archiving software later this year.
Princeton Softech has been focusing on what it calls “active archiving” through its Active Archive Solutions, which provides the ability to not only archive raw database data but also include the data schema to maintain its integrity. It allows, for instance, a bank to archive older ATM transactions and maintain a records relationships to a specific customer, said Lisa Cash, CEO of the Princeton, N.J., company.
Next up, the company is pushing that active archiving capability to specific applications. Princeton Softech first made its foray into that effort in May with the introduction of its Archive Servers for Clarify Edition for users of the popular help desk application. In the third quarter of this year, the vendor plans to launch Archive for Servers PeopleSoft Edition for users of PeopleSofts latest ERP suite, Cash said. Archive for Server Oracle Financials Edition is scheduled to follow by the end of this year or early in 2003.
The application-specific archiving software has built-in support for specific applications data models and pre-set business rules and archiving criteria to help ease setup for customers and provide more functionality, Cash said.
“Its preprogrammed and ready to go for that application,” Cash said.
The archiving software is available for popular databases, including IBMs DB2, Oracle, Informix, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server.
Cash said archiving makes sense for companies wanting to avoid the additional cost and management of growing their databases to keep up with data. Companies often must keep older data for regulatory and tax reporting purposes. With archiving, they can keep business-critical data on the production database and offload the rest to cheaper tape or disk storage through archiving, she said.
“What we do is maintain the referential integrity of the data,” Cash said. “What youre doing is limiting or controlling the growth of data so that you are continuing to enhance performance of the application and you enhance the availability of the applications.”
Beyond archiving, Princeton Softech also is planning to support an additional database platform for its popular Relational Tools database-testing tool. The company plans to begin beta testing within the next three weeks a version of the testing software for IBMs IMS mainframe database. It should be generally available by the end of the third quarter, Cash said.
Development also is beginning to support IMS for the Active Archive Solutions, which Cash expects to become available in the software in early 2003.
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