“The six of them fought a battle of attrition against an insurmountable foe; a flow of paper that never seemed to end. Each morning they’d retrieve a big stack of printed customer records, which would represent their work for the day. There was another staff member dedicated to printing, and yet another whose sole task was to staple the records together.”
You can see the rest of this story here: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Manual-Migration.aspx.
It is surprising how often we encounter clients and competitors who are just not worried about data migration when re-architecting their legacy system. I think the underlying assumption is very similar to the company Joe in this story works at: in the worst case scenario, we’ll just hire a couple of interns and have them transcode the data. Which might be preceded by some SQL script development or some DBA wizardry.
These are organizations that are spending enormous amounts of resources to creating a fully functional, auditable and correct, and at the same want to trust some school age kids to enter their critical data. Or a bunch of Perl scripts which might be right, might be wrong, who knows?
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MAKE Technologies has a most excellent rule based data migration tool, that audits and logs every data activity that was performed. It runs integrated with the continuous integration build of your application on multi-Gigabyte data-sets. That’s how quick it is. It is called DMW, for Data Modernization Workbench, and more information can be found here: http://www.maketechnologies.com/products/tlmdm/.
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- Mik Lernout
