Hi,

What is the best way to archive 8-9 years worth of data...we have a customer that would like their old data removed from the production database and handed over to them in some format.. what's the best way to go about this? Thank you!

I would start with describing the "some format" thing.

Well, we want to let them know what options they have... CD, csv files, etc...I prefer to do it the easiest way... and wanted to know how people generally off-load data....what's the most common format?

I think the most common format is the one that is suitable for the purpose. What your customer are planning to do with the data? Do they want to be able to analyze it and run some reports? Do they want to be able to re-create the database? Do they need an ability to load it into another DBMS? ASCII files (CSV or not) are the lowest common denominator, but they must be accompanied by extensive documentation describing their format, otherwise in 6 months you will struggle to find anyone who has a clue about what's in there. XML is more verbose but is somewhat self-documenting. On the other hand, you might just as well give them a compressed DB2 backup image...

Thank you..I will ask our customer.. I know that they may want to analyze it and run some reports on it in the future. If they ask for the data in CSV format, how can that be done? Their data is not in a separate database.. it's mixed with data of our other clients as well.. for example, we have one tablespace for readings called Reading_tblsp. Is there some utility I can use to do the archive of their data for us? And after we have their data offloaded in a certain format..we want to remove all this data from our original database. This is data for 10 years.. millions of records.. so don't think a simply query will cut it.