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From small personal businesses to wide spread multinational companies, all are using databases as central component of their record keeping systems. With the passage of time the amount of information stored in databases grows, also the risk increases that in a few years most of it may be lost because of technological changes in hardware, operating systems and database management systems (DBMS). It may not be possible to regenerate the information or maybe very expensive to do so. Many strategies have been proposed and standards have been developed to cope with the problem. Selecting a database preservation strategy depends on many factors including the nature of data stored in the database, the way it is retrieved and used and the period of time for which it should be preserved.

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Arif Ur-Rahman is a Doctoral student in the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal and works as a Researcher in the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores (INESC), Porto, Portugal. He has been working in the field of Database Preservation since 2007 and has published research papers in well know international conferences.

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