Deleting workitems in a productive system

[Michael Pokraka]

Greetings all,
I have a requirement that's a bit conflicting:
Client is generating a lot of workflows which have no historical
significance (They are mostly for processing documents after creation).
 
Now, we can use archiving, but something irks me about archiving a large
amount of data (we're talking in Gigabytes/month), the majority of which
is useless.
Some alternatives come to mind: deleting, 'split' archiving, or just
biting the bullet and using standard archiving. Some random thoughts on
this:
 
 - Deletion via RSWWHIDE and RSWWWIDE is not recommended by SAP or
   'The Book' (and also in a recent post by Jocelyn :)
   Here I would create and thoroughly test a set of variants to be run
   regularly. However I'm curious as to what (if anything) might not be
   covered by these jobs.
 - Archiving these seperately. I'm not exactly an archiving expert and
   have no idea if it's feasible to split/create variants of the
   WORKITEM archiving object - one to archive the 'real' workflows and
   one to archive the 'transient' ones into an electronic dustbin. I
   don't see any selections based on any specific tasks.
   If possible, this would be the favoured approach as I believe
   archiving has a lesser impact on system load.
 - Biting the bullet and just using normal archives. I have no idea
   apart from storage requirements if there is any impact on things like
   retrieval or anything else. Out of principle it's a bit irritating
   though :-)
 
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Mike