Handling out-dated transaction records

For performance issue, I believe many program should have a house-keeping procedure to clean up transaction history. Is there any best practice to perform this? Or should it be done simply by moving transaction data from the transaction table into a history table? Any better or consideration that I should be concerned of?Depends on your environment. Many places would like to keep records for atleast 2 years, but if you are in the medical field and some of your stuff may fall under HIPAA, then you need to keep the records I believe for like 7+ years. In those cases, I usually have an audit table that contains all the transaction data (It's written to via a trigger). Then I keep the transaction table fairly clean (only recent/open/pending), and if you need historical data, then I run my queries off the audit table instead which is never purged and has a good set of indexes on it.