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Approaches to database archiving at the Danish National Archives. 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
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Approaches to database archivingat the Danish National Archives
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
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
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)
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