1. Approaches to database archiving at the Danish National Archives

2. Databases in any flavour
1976 – mostly hierarchical databases or network databases
system independent archiving, but very flexible requirements
fixed or variable field length
any kind of data type
alphanumeric, packed decimal, binary, floating point
any kind of character set
BCD, EBCDIC, ASCII, and many proprietory variants of these

3. Relational databases only
1998, 2000, 2004 – all databases must be submitted as relational databases
system independent archiving, strict requirements
hierarchical databases must be migrated to relational databases
markup language used to describe stucture
fixed or variable field length
data types limited to the most common ISO data types
character set limited to ISO

4. The search for the next rdb archving format
2005 – still searching for a more standardarised (closer to SQL) and widespread rdb archiving format
Options:
further developing our own format
ADDML
SIARD
DBXML
and a few other even smaller projects
2007 First International Workshop on Database Preservation (PresDB’07)

5. SIARD chosen
SIARD = Software-Independent Archiving of Relational Databases
XML markup of SQL DDL (SQL:1999)
XML markup of data
Developed by the Swiss Federal Archive
Chosen as archive (preservation) format for databases in the European PLANETS project