Re: Creating "Hot" archives

Cosmo Lee <"* N O - S P A M* cosmo"@echonyc.com> wrote: :I have a client who wants to archive data, but also wants to be able to :get to the data in a fashion quicker than loading it into a table from a :regular archive or unload. One question I was asked was if data could :be archived to onto a hot-pluggable drives and plugged in when needed. : :My thoughts on this is that it might be doable, but the following are :issues. ...snip of issues that seems very far fetched that they would work at all... :4) This seems like a very cumbersome way to do things. Yes. I doubt very much that it would work at all. Even if it did, I wouldn't want to live with such a setup. :Does anybody have better suggestions on how to accomplish the same? :Could tables be mounted and unmounted on removable media such as Jaz, :Syquest or Magneto-Optical drives??? This would have the same problems. As far as I know the only solution Informix have for something similar is for blobspace on optical drives. I don't think that solution works for regular tables. However with the current very low prices of harddisks I would simply create the "archive" tables as regular tables. These may be in another database that you do not back up as regularly as the rest of the instance if that is an issue. (OnBar can do that, can't it?) You should be able to use low performance 4 GB disks or 9 GB disks, whatever is cheapest, for this purpose. When the tables became old enough you might simply onload them, back the unloadfile up to tape and drop them. Should they ever become needed again you could allways reload them. If the customer can't afford these aditional disks I would doubt their real need for this kind of accessibility. (Isn't the price of a 4GB disk something like US$ 500 now?) The only alternative I see then is to unload the data as you suggest. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org