Data purge
A data purge is the process of permanently removing data.
You might want to purge data after you complete your installation and testing to remove any "garbage" data
– or –
to consolidate or reduce the amount of data
after you create a backup of historical data.
For example, the company wants to have immediate access (through drill around, queries, running reports, and so on) to the current year's data plus the two previous years. You archive the data for the years previous to the years you want to access and then purge the data from the production database.