US Patent 10318493 Custom policy driven data placement and information lifecycle management

A method, apparatus, and system for custom policy driven data placement and information lifecycle management in a database management system are provided. A user or database application can specify declarative custom policies that define the movement and transformation of stored database objects. A custom policy defines, for a database object, a custom function to evaluate on an associated database object to determine whether an archiving action is triggered. Archiving actions may include compression, data movement, table clustering, and other actions to place the database object into an appropriate storage tier for a lifecycle phase of the database object. The custom function is defined by the database user, and can flexibly include any customized business logic using data sources internal and external to the database, including database access statistics such as segment level or block level heatmaps.