Here's what I have.
I'm creating a new database and the basics are in there. However, one thing I would like to include is a permanent history of changes made to each record. I know that certain databases can maintain their own records, but I have no guarantee that the actual running database software will have this enabled or not, so I need to implement it myself.

Esentially, the data I want to keep is a smaller subset of the records in question. The largest chunk is a medium blob/text field. plus about a dozen or so different related fields.

My question is this... just how should I approach this problem? Just do a straight forward update into a seperate table, and not worry about it or should I be compressing this data using some sort of compression algorithm such as LZ77?
I expect a lot of updates to this archive database, but I don't expect too many queries.

If you need any more details, then feel free to ask. :)

Update: I should add a bit of clarification here. I apologize for any confusion and I really appreciate all of the responses from all directions.

I'm creating a permanent history of changes to records on each transaction. Ergo monthly backups won't be viable unless I capture the changes as well. However, I did neglect to accomodate those monthly backups in case of failure, so I really want to thank pg for mentioning.

I don't have admin access to the database. The actual database itself is maintained by a third entity. I can put in, "requests," to change its running state, but I get no guarantees. In fact, I'm still waiting on a response from the admin on exactly how the database is configured so I can attempt to replicate it as closely as possible on the test system. I think he went on vacation six months ago.

There will be no need to replay the entire archive to recreate the database. In most cases, I'll only need to go back two or three records. I can only think up very few worst case scenarios where I might need to walk backwards through the archives. Any other use of the archive would be purely for reference.

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Thanks for your patience.
Prove your knowledge @ HLPD

In reply to Archiving data in a database by SavannahLion

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