Data growth and archival & purge

Question

Hello

In normal enterprise applications using RDBMS , we would tend to archive data after a certain number of years and purge those data from the actual tables. It is like creating a rolling window of time to retain data in the system which can be referred at any point of time.

What are your thoughts about data on Multichain. With the volume tending to grow continuously and at times at a high rate , how do we create the logical and physical separation between data in use and in archive.

Please suggest your thoughts , strategies and roadblocks that you perceive from such an ask in the application set up.

 

 

Thanks

Answer 1

By their nature, blockchains are append-only archives, so you are right that they grow continuously.

So I think the best strategy for dealing with data growth, if it goes beyond the storage capacity of the participants, is to partition by time. In other words, start a new blockchain every year, or two or ten, and close down the old ones, archiving their data away.

It is relatively easy in MultiChain to carry the private keys and addresses across from one chain to the next, by copying the appropriate blockchain parameters and using APIs like dumpprivkey and importprivkey.

The relevant blockchain parameters for consistent addressing across chains are:

address-pubkeyhash-version

address-scripthash-version

private-key-version

address-checksum-value