I would like to get a feel for what others are doing about purging the payroll files. We have not purged any data from the payroll tables since going live in 2001. Our PRDistrib table definitely needs to be purged.

How often do you purge tables? Do you have a company set-up for termed employees? What do you do to access archived info?

Any tips, processes, vendor products would be helpful.

Thanks!

We have the same issue. We haven't purged any files since 1/2000. We have tried to purge the files in TEST using Lawson's recommended procedures but it generates a useless flat file that must be re-imported into Lawson to read the information. We also saw a presentation by a 3rd party consultant that has a solution but it was very costly.

Has anyone ever purged any payroll records out of the system?

We've done this for 2 clients so far. And I would be the first to tell you that there is certainly not a canned way of doing this. Each time it was done from scratch and with a lot of eyes on the work. We didn't keep a separate company for either of them, they just wanted records older than a certain date purged. Obviously backups were made of the data but nothing easily viewable. In each case we had to follow the relationships between the objects they wanted removed carefully and if I recall correctly we had some issues that didn't surface for a couple of week the first time we tried this as some orphaned records were left behind and required some manual clean up. Years ago when I worked at the mother ship there was a DBA at a client who decided he could wipe out some data ranges and caused a lot of grief, gotta love those guys.
So you're not alone, a lot of clients aren't doing anything about it and just keep making the database larger every month.

trezaei,

Can you remember where you started with tracing all of the tables? We're in the same boat as everyone else apparently. A PRDISTRIB chugging along for a couple of years now and reaching 13 Million + rows. Should we just start at PRDISTIB and see where that takes us?

I was thinking of starting with PRDistrib. If I understand PR300 correctly (Unix, 8.03, MSP9), I can just purge/archive data from PRDistrib. Has anyone done this? Any gotcha's?