(ILM) Information Lifecycle Management is a set of processes and policies for managing data throughout its useful life. One important component of an ILM strategy is determining the most appropriate and cost-effective medium for storing data at any point during its life time:

1. newer data used in day-to-day operations is stored on the fastest, most highly-available storage tier,
2. older data which is accessed infrequently may be stored on a less-expensive and less-performant storage tier.

Older data may also be updated less frequently in which case it makes sense to compress and store the data as read-only.
Oracle Database provides the ideal environment for implementing your ILM solution. Oracle supports multiple storage tiers, and since all of the data remains in the Oracle database, the use of multiple storage tiers is completely transparent to the application and the data continues to be completely secure. Partitioning provides the fundamental technology that enables data in tables to be stored in different partitions. Although multiple storage tiers and sophisticated ILM policies are most often found in enterprise-level systems, most companies and most databases need some degree of information lifecycle management. The most basic of ILM operations, archiving older data and purging or removing that data from the database, can be orders of magnitude faster when using partitioning.