We have recently developed a suite of SQL Server tools to help large banks move aged loan application data from their production loan origination database to an archive database. This allows them to keep the size of the production database manageable while maintaining the ability to report and analyze the historical data.

We started with a system provided by the loan origination vendor, but in the case of our heaviest user, we were moving several million applications, each of which could have thousands of rows of data spread amongst 250 tables. The vendor’s tool packaged them up and moved them, but it took longer than was acceptable for our use case.

Our solution moved the data from one database to the other in a tiny fraction of the time compared to the original solution provided. We were able to validate the move of almost five million loan applications with no loss of data integrity, and without having to schedule production down time.