With the new GDPR regulation coming into effect by May 2018, many companies need better ways to delete their documents, especially from OnDemand.
Most regulatory agencies don't accept the "lazy delete" done with arsdoc delete and by the ODWEK API, where only the database record pointing to the document is removed, while the document data itself is left intact on disk (and other storage).
(Most of you guys here on the forum would succeed in restoring such a "deleted" document, if you had access to the database and the files on disk.)
Are there any other options?
If we do an export + reload (after removing the document that is to be deleted) and then unload the original load, a new (minor) problem appears: the segmentation order is disrupted. Example: Say that you for a given Application Group have 100 or more segment tables, and they have been created sequentially by/with daily printouts.
Then you unload and reload a batch, which for this example is 5 years old. When you reload it, it ends up in the CURRENT segment table, and the START_DT (Start date) column for the current table will be set to a much earlier date. If you repeat this, the segmentation will eventually become really messed up and searches will be slower, since a lot of (unnecessary) tables will be searched.
Are there any better methods out there to delete data from the FAA* files?
Has anyone been bold/crazy enough to investigate a solution which overwrites part of the data file on disk? (NOT recommended!)
Can you "re-open" a segment table for writing, temporarily? (As far as I know, you can only close a table and that automatically creates a new one. Of course, you could close the current table, reload the old data into a new table, and then close that table too. But that would create a whole lot of new tables over time.)
Can you forcefully move a batch of documents from one segment table to another?
Any other solution?
Please share your thoughts and solutions here. Also if you happen to know that IBM has a solution for this up the sleeve, I'd like to know.