Informatica White Paper Sample

As Enterprise Application vendors expanded and improved their applications in the late 1990s to make their applications truly enterprise-grade solutions, organizations expanded their use of these applications throughout their enterprise. As a consequence, these organizations have had exponential transactional data growth. Rarely, if ever, did they delete data. Organizations have continued to add new applications, further increasing the amount of data they generate. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet, more users than ever have been demanding access to the business systems that IT supports. These additional business users continue to add to the transaction data growth problem.

A leading manufacturer of electronic test tools and software needed to dramatically improve the response time of an inventory online application. Archiving inventory data produced immediate performance improvement and gave the business people relief from ever increasing performance problems.

At the same time that data volume has been growing, it has become increasingly difficult for organizations to purge data. Organizations have increasingly adopted conservative data retention policies to address the threat of potential future litigation. Regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), SOX for Japanese Companies (JSOX), Basel II in Europe, and many others require organizations to retain business data indefinitely. As data volumes have grown, the time and effort necessary for end users and database administrators to perform essential tasks on production systems has increased. End users find that data entry responsiveness declines and reports take longer to run. Database backups are slower. And essential administrative tasks such as upgrading applications or applying software patches become more time consuming.