Splitting data between two databases- one is archive, one is active

I'm not sure the best way to design this, so here goes:

I'm tracking students, papers, attendance, and grades through a current semester (now) and through a past set of semesters for reporting. Tables are partly keyed by semester.

I've archived off old semesters to a second database because there is a lot of data and the backups were including that.

Now, I'm not sure how to design a workable solution if someone needs to search across multiple semesters.

For example, someone might search for student records across this semester and a few in the past. The way I have it now, I'd have to either co开发者_JAVA百科py some of the records to the current database for searching or combine the two db's with a Union.

What's a good way to handle this? SQL Server 2005.

Unless you're tracking grades for every class for every student at a major university, there is no need to archive anything. Keep them together in the same database. Expose a view of the current semester to "joe user" and require some additional security for history.