Treating the End of the Data Life Cycle as a First-Class Citizen in Data Engineering

Evolving regulatory frameworks, digital decarbonization, or new management challenges due to exponential data growth are bringing end-of-life data management to the forefront and making it an important building block in data engineering. However, the end of the data life cycle and in particular its management has received little attention in literature and practice. We argue this is partly due to the lack of an overarching model that creates a common understanding that data engineering experts and practitioners can build upon. We present Destroy Claims, which provides a standardized and comprehensive description of the end of the data life cycle and a corresponding architectural proposal for its integration. We demonstrate the feasibility of the solution through a use case inspired by practice, an evaluation gathered from expert discussions, and a survey. The results indicate that the proposed solution is a promising approach to support end-of-life data management in practice.