Purging Aleph Acquisitions records

Description

We would like to purge old Acquisitions data from the system.  How can we do this?

Resolution

There is no Aleph service or any “standard procedures” for purging old Acquisitions information. Orders, invoices, invoice line items, budgets, budget transactions, claims, and arrival records are connected to each other in complicated ways.  This can be seen in the last page of the attached "Aleph Record Relationships" document, attached to this article: Aleph_Record_Relationship_Diagrams_17-20.doc.   Article Order purge discusses this issue in regard to old orders.

If you were to attempt this, the idea would be to delete "lower-level" records first.  These would be the z601 Budget transactions, the z75 Invoice line items, the z501 Claims, and the z75 Arrival records.  Then z76 Budget, z77 General Invoice, and z68 Order records which no longer have connections might be deletable.  (Of course, in performing any such operations, any tables being updated should first be backed up with the file-03 Service.)  

There is one kind of acquisitions record which can readily be deleted: z71 (Order log) records.  There is no Aleph service which does this, but it can be done via SQL with little danger**. In a typical installation the z71 grows large quite quickly and typically occupies more space than all of the other Acquisitions records put together. 

Note 1: One thing that you *do* want to consider in deleting z71’s: you should make certain that none of the records being deleted have a z71_action_date in the future (or, probably, also, the recent past). You should, of course, back up the z71 table via the file-03 Service before performing any such update.

** Ex Libris' official policy is to not delete Aleph Oracle records via SQL.  If you have space and they are not causing slowness in Acquisitions activities, we recommend that you just leave them.

• Article last edited: 23-Mar-2016