Analysis & Commentary:

BATCH PROCESSING AND ACTIVE ARCHIVING

Batch processing is a regular procedure with large corporations today. While many companies schedule their batch processing to take place after hours and expect to be up and running in the morning, database bloat is slowing this process.

According to META Group, as much as 70 percent to 90 percent of downtime may be directly associated with planned activities such as batch processing, upgrades and back-up procedures.

Customer service representatives need to be able to access data from mission-critical databases. If the overnight maintenance procedures are still running, customer service representatives cannot access important data. This leads to loss of immediate revenue by means of unsatisfied customers, where the end result is a loss of market share.

Corporate databases have become bloated by federal data retention requirements and huge amounts of data that is not critical to daily business. Federal data retention requirements have become quite strict over the past couple of years; for instance, the transportation industry requires companies to hold transaction and freight information for seven years. In an era when timely access is a necessity in big-business, as customer service representatives need to pull complete customer information while conversing with them in real-time, this spells disaster. At 8:00 am, customers cannot be left holding on while maintenance windows eat up the clock.

Large enterprises like MidAmerican, CNF and National Steel are taking advantage of Princeton Softech's Active Archive Solutions to improve maintenance windows and reduce batch processing time for mission-critical applications. Active Archiving helped National Steel improve batch processing cycles by more than 20 percent for their Order Fulfillment System by active archiving 65 percent of the data off of the system.

Princeton Softech's Active Archive Solutions allow companies to safely remove infrequently used data from production databases for storage on cost effective storage media such as tape or writeable optical disk. Active reference data is stored to an active archive with its referential integrity intact, enabling users to easily browse, search and selectively restore data in its original business context.

Once active archiving takes place, the resulting database contains less data, allowing for quicker batch processing, backup procedures and other planned maintenance.

Contact Paul Reiter, for Princeton Softech, 215-867-8600 x255, or preiter@garfieldgroup.com.