Hi Erik - There's a great button about Usenet - "Reading Usenet is like drinking from a firehose; Posting to Usenet is like shouting from a mountaintop; Archiving Usenet is like saving used toilet tissue." BGP may be somewhat more important, useful, and the results consumable in the short-term, but for long-term archiving I think it devolves to being more interested to researchers and other ubernerds who can use the libraries and the very valuable data store and service that RIPE provides (which is appreciated)! I was thinking more for the medium term "what's normal" that goes back beyond whatever's in the routing table this second, probably for a few weeks to months max in most cases. And I think for actual diagnosis what's needed is a great tool to ask network and business questions of historic BGP data. That's the context in which I mention Renesys tools+data. So I'd say to help the networkers of the world, it's probably more about tools than history. Thanks, Avi

RIS provides data in a searchable MySQL database for three months.

All we've ever collected is kept in a raw data format. This archive starts in 1999, and we maintain a library to read the data. This data is free to use for any purpose and we will not remove any of our raw data as it gets older.

We are also carefully looking into whether we should reduce or increase the amount of data in our MySQL database - as that's easy to search for our users.

However, any increase obviously comes with increased resource usage - so this is something that requires careful thinking and planning. Another option is to store aggregated info on older data, instead of keeping every update that ever occured.

But, this is just an idea that crosses our minds from time to time - I'm not making promises on what we will implement :)

Of course, any ideas on how much more history would help you, are very welcome.

cheers, -- Erik Romijn RIPE NCC software engineer