Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a great way to dig into data-management, partitioning, and serious considerations about your datamodel.
You should always do ILM, in one form or another.
However .... ,
The term is now being hijacked by the Marketing Departments of Storage- System-, Database-, application-, ETL-, and just about any other FUD-touting vendor.
Oracle is also promoting ILM. They even provide an ILM (gui-)tool for free.
Why?
Well, ILM relies on Partitioning, and Partitioning is ... licensed. Ka-Tching.
If you go down the ILM route, the usual disclaimers apply:
- use at own risk.
- RTFM (...) please.
- proceed with extreme caution.
But it will be a good learning experience and as a buzzword, ILM looks good on your CV.
Hence vendors in various layers of the stack (disk/storage, database, ETL, business-intelligence, compliance, architects, consultancy etc...) all try to sell ILM "solutions" (e.g. ILM-slower/older-disks, ILM-partitioning, ILM-extract-tools, ILM-methodologies, ILM-audits, ILM-patterns, ILM-best-practices, ...)
If you like bling and flash, and good entertainment, this is where you should be in the next months : Ai, El, and Em - ILM.
Quite fun to see:
The trainees, the D-division, and all other abitious employees are sent out to promote this TLA. Expect lots of seminars, catered-food and drinkies...
And some of it looks ok, credible even. Like I said: Every good datamodel should have some ILM in it. Its just that we used to call it "archiving" (=boring) or "cleansing" (sounds like washroom sanitation maintenance dunnit ?).
ILM is definitely the way to go. Unless you can spot TNT coming (The Next TLA) ...
I'm waiting for the bang.
