Delete messages in Productive without archiving

[Former Member]

Hello all,

our database for the message are increasing very fast.

Unfortunatley, we forgot to archive the messages.

Now we have mors as 3 million entries in the table, and

the archiving process runs days and days. One week

later I checked the table and I found, that the flag was

only changed for 20.000 messages even though the

archiving process are still running.

I

So we decide, that archiving for these messages

aren't necessary and we want to delete these message

without archiving. Is there any possiblity to change the

IFACTION Flag from ARCH to DEL ? or other

possibilities.

Kind reagards

Stephan Kohler

[laszlo_lakatos]

Hello Stephan,

there is no supported tool to delete messages marked for archiving in a productive system.

Though if you really need to do this, you could write a report which overwrites ITFACTION ARCH -> DEL for corresponding entries in table SXMSPMAST (or in the active container if switch procedure is on).

Also consider performance of such update, and perform this step by step (for example 100 messages together).

Regards,

Laszlo

[former_member74823]

Hello!

You can set the retention period of archive to 0 (zero). Please refer to SAP note #872388 - Troubleshooting Archiving and Deletion in PI.

Best regards,

Franklin Ayres

[Former Member]

Hi Stephan,

the archive procedures in SAP (SARA) have all been fixed so you cannot delete data which was not archived. However, if you know a little ABAP, you can achieve a lot

I haven't done this yet for PI messages (did for Internal Orders once), but the principle should work: make a clone of the delete program (find it through SARA, or through a dummy/test delete job), find out where in the code the program checks if the messages were already archived, and make sure this test returns with an 'archived OK' flag. Execute at own risk.

Hope this helps.

kr,

Peter Glas