Which is the best method to remove old data?

Our application has been installed at customers in North America, Europe and South America for several years, in some cases, over 10 years. At least one of our customers has hundreds of gigabytes of data. We are considering options for cleaning out the old data.

The database runs on a variety of systems (Linux, Windows, Unix) and in several version (Oracle 9, 10, and 11). We need a solution that works in all environments.

Two of our main criteria for a successful solution are that:

·         It maintains application data referential integrity. Our application makes little use of foreign key constraints, so the cleanup process will apply critical business rules to candidate data to determine if it can be deleted or not.