Hello All,
I'm planning to work in BaaN IVc4 archiving, but I've some basic questions. Could you please help me?

1. Archiving normally we need to do in production or test server?
2. What's the difference between archiving company and history company in company parameters? Because sessions in sales and purchase, inventory, and manufacturing uses archiving company, but the finance archiving sessions uses history company? Is the finance data stored in history company instead of archiving company? Do we need to create archiving and history company separately or same company can be setup as history company and also used as archive company?
3. Archive sales orders, sales history, purchase orders, purchase history has options to delete the data after archiving, but the archive production orders, hours history etc are not having the option of deleting? Here my question is only sales and purchase can be deleted, production orders and hours can only be archived, not possible to delete them, right?

Thank you very much for your help in advance.

dmanick

1. The scope of archiving is to reduce unused data, to get better system performances, so if you do that in test environment there is no gain on production environment...

2. Archiving and Historic are synonims. In case of single company they could be the same.

3. Some data have different life cycle than other data of the same 'kind'. Standard programs offers only a limited choice how to move/copy/delete them, because the condition of deleting them could be very complex, other tables could have different business requirements for preserving them that can change from company to company, so the way they offers to archive are, of course, a 'standard' way.
By example, the financial integration tables (one of the most 'fat' tables, and one of the bad performances causes after years of ERP usage) could be deleted only if the project related is closed, because they are used to calculate project costs during closure of the project itself.

Archiving normally we need to do in production or test server?

Probably best to do the archiving in the test server first to work out any issues, like reference problems. I like to refresh the test server from production before doing the archive for the first time.

What's the difference between archiving company and history company in company parameters? Because sessions in sales and purchase, inventory, and manufacturing uses archiving company, but the finance archiving sessions uses history company? Is the finance data stored in history company instead of archiving company? Do we need to create archiving and history company separately or same company can be setup as history company and also used as archive company?

Archive and history company is the same. Each production company should have an archive company assigned. The table sharing between companies in the history/archive company environment should mirror the sharing in the production environment. You should not share any tables between the history/archive and production environments except for the companies (tccom000) table. I like to add the archive/history company tables in a different database (Baan database definition and/or physical database) than the production system. This permits different database maintenance activities (like real time replication and timing of backups) in each environment = replicate and backup frequently in production, backup history/archive only following a Baan archiving event).

Archive sales orders, sales history, purchase orders, purchase history has options to delete the data after archiving, but the archive production orders, hours history etc are not having the option of deleting? Here my question is only sales and purchase can be deleted, production orders and hours can only be archived, not possible to delete them, right?

This is where the test system archive is valuable before proceeding with production. (1) Determine what you want to archive and the amount of data you want to keep in the production tables (archive and delete), then history/archive tables (delete only) for each table. (2) Perform the archives in test, reviewing the results in the "production" companies. (3) Review the history/archive companies. If the users want to switch to a history company and run various sessions, test these sessions in the history/archive companies. (4) Create custom archive/delete sessions for any data that is missing from the history/archive companies, including custom tables.

Deletions of tables that are not handled in the archive session can be done manually (you can delete production orders by number range) or by writing a custom session to do so.