ArcSDE Archiving - H tables

Question

We have ArcSDE 10.0 on MSSQL 2008 with Geodatabase archiving enabled. In the process of updating a topology I deleted the topology, disabled archiving, unregistered as versioned and then recreated the topology.

It seems that when I did this a copy of the feature classes in the feature dataset were created at the root of the geodatabase suffixed with an "_H". When I deleted and created the topology again the features classes were copied to the root of the gdb again with an "_H1" suffixed.

Does anyone know what's going on? I was told these were the Archiving tables. Please provide links if available.

Answer 1

Try disabling archiving before you delete anything. When you disable archiving, you should get a message that gives you an option to keep or discard the history (the _H table). If you keep it, then it becomes a regular ol' feature class. The _H tables track the history of changes to the default version, as you make edits to a feature class that has archiving enabled. The _H1 tables likely got created when you re-created something in the archiving enabled feature dataset. In this case, the geodatabase first tried to create the _H table, saw that a table with that name already existed, and so added the suffix 1 to it. If you repeated the set of operations, you would end up with _H2 tables, and so on.

Answer 2

I am looking for the answer to this also.
here is my first starting point understanding archiving 9.3
understanding archiving 10.0
understanding archiving 10.1
I posted all three because there is something good in each one.
So here a really old 2006 document that shows not much has changed with archiving.

9.3 archive tables in sql server
10.0 System table in sql server

After reading quite a bit of this. I registered my feature dataset as versioned, disabled archiving, unregistered my dataset as versioned, and then deleted my _H historical tables.
Let me know if that doesn't work for you.