http://help.sap.com/saphelp_erp60_sp/helpdata/en/8f/f3b142304cc511e10000000a1550b0/content.

ht m Data archiving is used by companies with two main goals in mind: reducing data volumes in the system and complying with legal data retention requirements ata that is no longer needed in online business, is written from the database to an archive, and then deleted from the database. Optionally the archived data can then be moved to an external storage system (ADK-based archiving). An important aspect of this entire process is that the archived data must be accessible at any time Based on technology archiving can be of 2 types: ADK-based Archiving ADK-based archiving(ABAP Server): is used only by ABAP applications that employ ABAP archiving objects in their data archiving projects.

XML-based archiving: (JAVA Server) is employed for XML archiving objects that are used by ABAP applications with XML interfaces, and for archiving sets used by JAVA applications.

In the IT process Monitoring, you monitor the behavior of the database and database tables with respect to data growth. This information helps you to determine which data should be archived and in which order