Hi

Its far from worst practice, but is something to consider. Archiving off data and making it subsequently accessible for historical reporting (typicaly old user queries and auditing) is difficult to plan and manage. I have worked on a lot of databases in my time as a DBA, and I have to say, very few analysts really take the time out to address this issue. I must say also that with the modern DBMS, large amounts of data can be searched quickly and effectively, server (cou, IO etc) performance is excellent and with the advent of grid-computing and highly distibuted systems with super quick periperials, archiving in MANY cases tends to be a non-issue and not worth the added costs in terms of application complexity.

Saying all of that, auditing tables and logs (where the friggen developers log everything you can possibly think of in their apps) is really tough and is the bane of a DBA's life, especially in terms of # indexes (yes - queriyign auditing tables is just as complex as the live ones, resulting in more indexing and speed issues).

Cheers

Chris K