Open Planets Foundation Hackathon 2012-02-07 Database Archiving Event

Approaches to database archivingat the Danish National Archives

Open Planets Foundation Hackathon 2012-02-07 Database Archiving Event

Databases in any flavour

• 1976 – mostly hierarchical databases or network databases

– system independent archiving, but very flexible requirements– fixed or variable field length– any kind of data type

- alphanumeric, packed decimal, binary, floating point

– any kind of character set- BCD, EBCDIC, ASCII, and many proprietory variants of these

Open Planets Foundation Hackathon 2012-02-07 Database Archiving Event

Relational databases only

• 1998, 2000, 2004 – all databases must be submitted as relational databases

– system independent archiving, strict requirements– hierarchical databases must be migrated to relational

databases– markup language used to describe stucture– fixed or variable field length– data types limited to the most common ISO data types– character set limited to ISO 8859-1

Open Planets Foundation Hackathon 2012-02-07 Database Archiving Event

The search for the next rdb archving format

• 2005 – still searching for a more standardarised (closer to SQL) and widespread rdb archiving format

• Options:– further developing our own format– ADDML– SIARD– DBXML– and a few other even smaller projects

• 2007 First International Workshop on Database Preservation (PresDB’07)

Open Planets Foundation Hackathon 2012-02-07 Database Archiving Event

SIARD chosen

• SIARD = Software-Independent Archiving of Relational Databases

– XML markup of SQL DDL (SQL:1999)– XML markup of data

• Developed by the Swiss Federal Archive• Chosen as archive (preservation) format for databases in the European PLANETS project