When you use Data Archive, you can archive data in multiple ways. You can archive data to partitions in the same database, to another database, or to a Data Vault. The Data Vault is an immutable, highly compressed file structure that you can query using standard SQL syntax.

The Data Vault provides the following features and benefits:

Data can be loaded and compressed into archived table form from any relational or flat file data source. The Data Vault stores the compressed, immutable data in the form of SCT files. The compressed data can be extracted by an SQL routine from either an application script or through a query tool, loaded into any target data database, and joined there with existing tables if required.

The degree of data compression is a function of the type of data. Since tokenization is a key part of the process, the more duplication there is in the source data, the higher the compression ratio. This also implies that the greater the amount of data–and therefore the higher the probability of duplication–the higher the resulting compression ratio.

The Data Vault cannot be updated. However, once data has been retrieved from the Data Vault and loaded into another data structure, it can be manipulated in all the usual ways to perform operations such as "what-if" analyses.