Hello,

I was wondering if somebody knows an elegant solution to the following:

Suppose I have a table that holds orders, with a bunch of data. So I'm at 1M records, and searches begin to take time. So I want to speed it up by archiving some data that is more than 3 years old - saving it into a table called orders-archive, and then purging them from the orders table. So if we need to research something or customer wants to pull older information - they still can, but 99% of the lookups are done on the orders no older than a year and a half - so there is no reason to keep looking through older data all the time. These move & purge operations can be then croned to be done on a weekly basis. I already did some tests and I know that I will slash my search times by about 4 times. So far so good, right?

However I was thinking about how to implement older archival lookups and the only reasonable thing I can think of is some sort of if-else If not found in orders, do a search in orders-archive. However - I have about 20 tables that I want to archive and god knows how many searches / finds are done through out the code, that I don't want to modify. So I was wondering if there is an elegant rails-way solution to this problem, by extending a model somehow? Has anyone dealt with similar case before?

Thank you.