Hi,

 

We want to migrate the current FUTURE database to a new SQL server.

 

However, in order to keep the database files to manageable size, we don’t want to transfer all data.

 

We only want to migrate 2013 and 2014 data to the new SQL server. Older data we want to archive and store as read-only on a different SQL server to be used for archiving.

 

And we want to do this archiving on yearly basis so we only keep active and required data on the FUTURE database server, and old archived data will be stored on the archive server.

(e.g. next year we would archive 2013 and keep 2014 & 2015 data)

 

The question I have for you is how can we do that?

 

Please treat this as urgent request. Thanks.


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The easiest way to do this is 
  1. create a new, empty database with a database user account with CREATE TABLE privileges;
  2. In FUTURE, create a new .ftrl file pointing to the new database. FUTURE will create all the required tables
  3. Within FUTURE, open up Database Explorer windows for the new and old databases. Copy the 2013 and 2014 data (right-click on the relevant folders);
  4. Once it is verified that the data has been successfully copied, delete or disable all .ftrl files pointing to the old database (e.g. by changing the database user password for the account used for the old database). Create an .ftrl file named "...Archive..." pointing to the old database. So now the users will have to use the new database, unless they go to the lengths of finding the "...Archive..." .ftrl file, which I imagine they would not do by accident.
  5. Relabel the 2014 data in the old database as temporary versions (because the final archived version will be based the end-of-year 2014 data).
  6. At the end of each year, move data from the active to the archive database, as in Step 3.
The archive database will not be read-only as a whole (because you need to write to it to transfer the data), but individual FUTURE models can be "Frozen" or made read-only using the functionality in FUTURE.