Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Remember that the support staff for the project must be trained before the migration in the
quality assurance (QA) environment begins. This allows the support staff to gain experien-
ce with their processes in the QA environment without being expected to apply what they
know to the live production system. By training the support staff early, the risks of errors
in the production system are greatly reduced. Early training of the support staff also eases
the transition of system responsibility from the project team to the support staff.
2.5.4
Development environment
The migration of the development environment (Dev) will typically be completed as
quickly as possible to minimize the transport freeze and reduce the migration window. The
amount of time needed will vary based on the project requirements. The runbook deve-
loped during the sandbox migration will be used and further refined during this phase of
the project. The project team can further develop the runbook to document every problem
and every resolution discovered along the way to use in the business-critical migration of
the production environment.
Again, the runbook must be updated with every step of the process no matter how ordinary.
For this reason, the most detail-oriented person from the core team should be tasked with
creating the runbook. The runbook will become the saving grace of the project during the
push to production. By the time of the production migration, every conceivable problem
should have been documented and resolved. The time needed for this upgrade and migra-
tion will depend on the size of the database and the network infrastructure. For example,
the migration of the Dev environment in a typical mid-sized project may take two to four
weeks.
As soon as the migration and upgrade are complete, unit tests should begin. The test team
must execute their test plans and report the results to the core team. The core team must
then make any adjustments needed based on the severity of the issues identified. Again,
each issue must be documented in the runbook along with the steps necessary to resolve
the issue.
At the end of this phase, a few days should be allowed to update plans and apply the lessons
learned to the planning for the next phase of the project. If critical issues have been iden-
tified which will impact later milestones, a change request must be submitted to address
the issues. If contingency time has been properly allocated in the project plan, there should
be little risk of a problem which will require a change request. However, not every project
