Because it’s an imperfect world, and problems happen, when they do you need the right data to be in the right places so you can carry out the necessary analysis to get to the root-cause of any problems.  You need some processing to at least purge (i.e. delete) old rows from the various ‘history’ database tables that the Teradata RDBMS populates whilst it is running.

The Teradata RDBMS does not automatically purge these ‘history’ tables; it will only continue inserting rows into the tables. However, it is generally recommended that you do not simply purge old rows from these tables because the data in these tables is of value and can be used for the following purposes:

• Performance monitoring
• Performance tuning
• Capacity planning
• Performance problem resolution

The product consists of a number of BTEQ scripts and database objects which:

• Copy data rows from database DBC to a user specified ‘system history’ database.
• Purge ‘old’ data rows from the tables in database DBC.
• Purge ‘old’ data rows from the tables in the ‘system history’ database.

The database objects allow:

• Efficient storage and retrieval of the historical data.
• Existing reporting code to run against the historical data with minimal changes.