Cold data
Cold : having a low temperature.

Cold data is historic in nature and is of interest to few users within the organisation – maybe as few as 1-2% of all data warehouse users.

Consumers of cold data are typically performing an audit or compliance role.

Ever increasing regulatory requirements demand the more and more organisations are able to easily access deep historic data. It is clearly not cost-effective to store terabytes of cold data within the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).

Cold Data Solution
Finding the right “cost v size” balance is the key objective for cold data.

We need to be able to support very large data volumes – potentially tens, or even hundreds, of terabytes.

Performance is not a major imperative unlike hot/warm solutions, and will typically provide access to only a handful of users for whom query response time is not normally a pressing issue.

Given the ever-decreasing cost and storage density of DASD, the cold data solutions should be architected around high capacity, low cost disk.