Is there anyway to archive old queries and workbooks rather than deleting?

[Former Member]

Our environment has thousands of old queries and workbooks. We plan to delete any object that has not been used within 13 months, but there's a concern we may someday need a few of the reports that will be deleted.

Is there a way to archive old queries and workbooks rather than deleting them?

Is there another approach to solving this matter?

Thanks!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Jim,

we had the same problem in our company and we created a special role for these reports. Every query which is older than 2 years is moved to this role. Now this role isn't assigned to any user (only if someone needs information from old queries) so that these queries can't be changed.

Hope it helps.

Greetings,

Daniel

[Former Member]

The "Last Used" field is stated in "UTC" (Universal Time Code), which appears to be in trillions of seconds. I need to tell BW a deletion data in UTC, but I don't know to mathematically convert UTC to a day/month/year, so I cannot tell the system an accurate cut off date.

Does anyone know anything about UTC? Is in seconds? If so, does it reference the number of seconds since the year 0000? Any insight will help me!

Thanks!

Jim

[Former Member]

Hi Jim,

we are doing this process once a month and the amount of old queries isn't very high. We use transaction PFCG for it and move them by marking the queries and assigning the new role to the marked queries.

You could also write an ABAP report which collects all queries older than 2 years and assign them, but for our needs the manual transfer is enough.

Greetings,

Daniel

[Former Member]

Daniel,

I think this is a great suggestion. Can you tell me if I have to move each query "one-at-a-time" or this is a faster way where I can move more than one at a time to the new role?

Thanks

[Former Member]

You can use the Browser to copy n query from a role to another ...

Hope it's help

Aleksi

[Former Member]

Hello Aleski,

Your suggestion to move the queries via the Browser is nice, but I'm not sure how to do it. For example, it's very simple to move workbooks and web queries via the Browser, but I'm not sure how to move Bex queries since I don't normally see them in the Bex Browser.

Any suggestions?

[Former Member]

Jim

This is really a intersting question as this is a reality as many BW reports are not used/accessed by users but still they have tendancies of sitting on these reports.

I wanted to suggest to carry-out report usabilty analys. This analysis u can carry out by using BW statistics/standerd queries/new queries in technical cubes showing usability data. If u found that a perticalar BW report is not been used for long time, u can discuss the usability of this report with the report user ( as it is a normal practice of owning BW report by user/user group across industry ), if user is no longer uses it Or do not need it any more, it will be better to delete those reports, this will free up some resources and will reduce the junk. ( if user wants these queries ask him to use it or it will better to personalise report in his desktop easing him to see those reports. )

Changing the technical names of the query as suggested by Bhanu will have follwing effects.

1. It will add more reports in repository leading to junk

2. Old queries still be assigned to user roles, so collide with user authorisation.

hope views are clear, others are welcome to add or share their experince in this regard.

kindly assign the points if it helps.

[former_member188975]

Hi Jim,

I don't think that there is a way to archive not used query definitions.

Another approach (though not so straightforward) might involve renaming the queries that are not to be used, or you may want to remove, using a naming convention different from the standard naming convention that you are using. eg. rename them to starting with XYZ_. Then you would need to manage this by allowing users access to all queries they are supposed to and not give them access to the XYZ* queries. This way they cannot even see that these queries exist.

Hope this helps...