How Is Data Migration Done?

Data integration and data migration must be well stablished and seamless processes whether data migrates from data lake inputs, from one repository to another, from a data warehouse to a data mart, or to and from the cloud. Without a competent data migration plan, businesses can go over budget, end up with overwhelming data processes, or find that their data operations fall short of expectations.

Data migration

Data migration strategy

There is more than one way to create a data migration strategy. The organization’s specific business needs and requirements will help determine what is most appropriate.

Big bang of migration

In big bang data migration, the full transfer is completed in a limited period of time. Live systems experience outages while data undergoes ETL processing and transition to a new database. The advantage of this method, of course, is that everything happens in one timed event that takes relatively little time to complete. However, the pressure can be intense because the business is working with one of its resources offline. If a big bang approach makes the most sense for your business, consider doing the migration process before the actual event.

T-shirt migration

In contrast, droplet migration completes the migration process in stages. During implementation, the old system and the new run in parallel, eliminating downtime or service interruptions. Real-time processes can constantly migrate data. Compared to the big bang approach, these implementations can be quite complex in design. The added complexity if done right usually reduces risk rather than adding it.

Best practices for data migration

Stick to the strategy

Too many data managers create a plan and then abandon it when the process goes too smoothly or when things get out of hand. The migration process can be complicated and sometimes even frustrating, so prepare for that reality and then stick to the plan.

Test

During the planning and design phases and during implementation and maintenance, test the data migration to ensure that you ultimately achieve the desired result.

Data migration software

Building data migration tools from scratch and coding them by hand is difficult and incredibly time-consuming. When you start looking for a software solution, look for the following factors in a vendor.

Data migration to the cloud

Organizations are increasingly migrating some or all of their data to the cloud to increase speed to market, improve scalability and reduce the need for technical resources. In the past, data architects were tasked with deploying large on-site server farms to store data on an organization’s physical assets. One of the reasons for the push for on-premise servers was concerns about cloud security.

Conclusion

If your organization is upgrading systems, moving to the cloud or consolidating data, data migration is on the horizon. It’s a big and important project, and data integrity demands that it be done right.