Welcome to SnowMirror 3.3! Even before the official launch at Knowledge16, SnowMirror team is proud to announce a general availability of its ServiceNow replication tool being fully compatible with the upcoming Helsinki release. SnowMirror 3.3 introduces several new features as well. The most important one is the completely new backup tool enabling storing individual tables into XML or CSV files. Another new feature is the support of the ServiceNow archiving plug-in. If enabled the archived records are being removed from the mirror database and on top of that SnowMirror enables replicating the archive tables too.
Helsinki Support
SnowMirror 3.3 fully supports the ServiceNow Helsinki release Patch 0. Table index handling has been re-worked and the replication algorithm together with data mapping has been adjusted. All connection testers and validation functions were improved and the whole application has been tested against a number of Helsinki instances. If you find any issues replicating the data from your Helsinki, please let us know at support@www.snow-mirror.com.
SnowMirror Backup
This is a completely new module or even a product provided by the SnowMirror team. SnowMirror is now a fully-featured backup tool for individual ServiceNow tables including full and incremental backups, backup retention policies and a restore procedure. There are two data formats supported. The native ServiceNow XML which allows importing the data quickly back to the platform and a universal CSV export. The restore process is designed to be under your full control by using standard import sets and admin features in ServiceNow. The data backups are easy to schedule with a wide range of scheduling options. You can schedule both full and incremental backups. The incremental backup runs are fast and the instance performance is not affected. Please note that this new feature is still in a Beta stage and it is available only for the Trial licenses. Existing customers interested in evaluating the feature please contact our support team at support@www.snow-mirror.com.
Data Archiving
As announced earlier in a separate post, ServiceNow contains an optional Data Archiving plug-in which allows moving data that is no longer necessary for immediate day-to-day access from primary tables into a set of archive tables. SnowMirror supported these archiving processes only by using a differential delete strategy or a differential synchronization. However, these features are not designed for huge tables that are usually being archived. The latest SnowMirror 3.3 supports removing archived records from a mirror table by using the Audit Delete strategy which is reading the ServiceNow archive log to find the set of removed records. It supports replication of the archive tables themselves as well. These tables contain a special timestamp sys_archived which replaces sys_updated_on as the main timestamp for incremental loads.
