Policies for archive/destroy rules for variable data in service catalog

[sbh]

While reading Vancouver release notes, I learned there are now default archive and destroy rules for "variable data of standard catalog items, record producers, and catalog task tables". The rules are inactive by default. I can see how it would be necessary to archive/destroy old records to maintain reasonable performance levels but we use some catalog items for forms, such as Registrar forms, which must be kept for seven years.

Do other higher ed institutions use the service catalog this way? If so, have you developed policies for when to archive and when to destroy old tickets? Do you move printer-friendly PDF copies to a document storage app to comply with legal requirements? Is reporting an issue?

Has anyone experienced delays in performance because they haven't archived/destroyed old data? When did you start noticing it? (I'm trying to get a rough idea of how long we have to work this out, though that probably depends more on the size of the variables tables than on the number of years worth of data or the number of tickets.)

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[Terri Kouba]

Hi sbh,

The University of California has many rules about what records to keep and what records to purge.  Plus we have recharge data in our system, so we have to comply with the recharge retention rules (5 years).  

We've had our two instances since 2024.  There are a couple tables where we run into slowness due to the number of records.  One table was the table of 'Deleted Records'.  We created a purge strategy to keep the records for 5 years.  That brought this able down from 18 million records to less than a million and it's zippy now!

Our RITMs/task tables are under 100,000 records.
We have more than 1.3 million incidents.

When we notice performance problems, it's usually due to not having an index on the right field.  The fields that are in your standard list views should be indexed, plus fields that are used as filters in reports.

On the forms we will encounter slowness when we have many client scripts that need to load when the page loads.  

I hope this helps give some context.  Don't hesitate to ask if you have additional questions.

Thanks,

Terri

[sbh]

Thank you, @Terri Kouba ! This is very helpful.