Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a set of processes and policies for managing data throughout its useful life. One important component of an ILM strategy is determining the most appropriate and cost-effective medium for storing data at any point during its lifetime: newer data used in day-to-day operations is stored on the fastest, most highly-available storage tier, while older data which is accessed infrequently may be stored on a less expensive and less efficient storage tier. Older data may also be updated less frequently so it makes sense to compress and store the data as read-only.
Oracle Database provides the ideal environment for implementing your ILM solution. Oracle supports multiple storage tiers, and because all of the data remains in Oracle Database, multiple storage tiers are transparent to the application and the data continues to be secure. Partitioning provides the fundamental technology that enables data in tables to be stored in different partitions.
Although multiple storage tiers and sophisticated ILM policies are most often found in enterprise-level systems, most companies and most databases need some degree of information lifecycle management. The most basic of ILM operations, archiving older data and purging or removing that data from the database, can be orders of magnitude faster when using partitioning.
For more information about ILM, see Managing and Maintaining Time-Based Information.