Quote Originally Posted by Bore
I think you should first find what you want to achieve. Lower the cost of the storage, improve the performance, or what? Also you have to decide do you need all the data on daily basis or most of them can be safely moved away from the database and kept somewhere just in case that someone needs that.
Then you can answer your questions yourself.
As a general principle I think this is incorrect. While you do need to be very clear about what you're trying to achieve and why, you also need to have a very good understanding of the pros and cons of all the possible solutions as well in order to define the most appropriate methodology -- that's where the experience part comes in.