you did not specify what you understand as "time-consuming" . An archive is a storage outside of your production SAP. So it is of course slower to retrieve data from an archive than from a table in your production server.
Everything what you need for your daily life is usually stored in close proximity to you, everything what is rarely used is stored in the cellar or the attic and you need some time to get there, find it there, and bring it with you.
A record in an archive is compressed, it is not anymore in a table structure, it has become an object structure.
If you look into the FM, you can can see that there is not much activity, it is an assembly of standard calls that are needed for an archive access.
I am not aware of a second function module for the same data (would it make sense to have 2 for the same thing?)
Organizing archiving will probably have a huge impact on the performance, I mean here how big an archive is, whether you have 100MB in file or 500MB I think that makes a big difference if the file is read sequentially.
An index on the archive (which is a table in SAP) can be defined by yourself - having all those fields that are frequently needed for reports - so you would not at all need to access the archive itself, but the more fields you put into such index the less gain you actually have from archiving.
There are quite a lot SAP notes for this function module, especially performance related notes when it has to do with the new General Ledger.
Bluesky
