Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
management process. This analysis provided the gaps that needed to be managed in the migration
process and the level of complexity along with the associated risks to be mitigated in the design
process of the migration program.
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Skills—the architecture analysis provided a skills gap that needed to be managed with both skills
training and additional staffing for the migration.
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Data architecture—the appliance architecture required the data model to be changed from its current
state to a simpler 3NF of hybrid architecture. There were not too many changes that needed to be
made, and the changes that were made were more aligned to the requirements from the BI layers.
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Infrastructure architecture—the appliance is a self-managing and highly available architecture
based on its design principles. The infrastructure architecture that is the biggest change is the
storage of the data changed from the traditional SAN to a distributed architecture, which is a
one-time change and provides a significant performance boost.
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ETL migration—the appliance platform supported the ETL applications natively, minimizing
the configuration and set up of the software on the new platform. There were changes in the
ETL process due to changes in the data architecture that needed to be developed and tested. The
additional changes that were made to the ETL layer included new modules that were designed
and developed to accommodate the migration of custom functions that were not supported in the
appliance platform.
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BI migration—the appliance platform supports the BI software and did not require additional
setup or configuration process. The changes that were made to this application were in the
semantic layers to reflect the changes in the data architecture, hierarchies, lookup and reference
tables, additional functions, and data structures to accommodate any custom functions that were in
the legacy platform.
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Analytics migration—the appliance platform supported all the analytical functions that were
available in the legacy platform and there were no specific migration requirements in this process.
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Migration process—the overall migration process was done after data migration, in four parallel
phases:
1.
Data migration—this was completed as a one-time migration exercise. New data model
deployment and additional data structures were created as a part of the migration. This
includes the additional transformations needed by each line of business for their requirements.
2.
ETL migration—this was initiated as a process that was implemented in parallel with the BI
and analytics migration. There were no dependencies on the user layers to implement the ETL
migration.
3.
Business intelligence migration—this was implemented in multiple phases within one large
phase, in parallel with the ETL and analytics migration.
4.
Analytics migration—this was implemented in parallel with BI and ETL migration. The
dependency for this phase to complete was the availability of data, which depended on the
ETL migration completion, especially for the new data structures.
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Production rollout—the production rollout and operationalization of the appliance platform is a
phased operation. This was implemented based on three critical factors:
1.
Business continuity—the most critical business applications were the first to be rolled out on
this platform based on the priority provided by the governance team.
2.
Adoption readiness—the business units that were ready to move to the appliance platform
became the second factor for the migration. For example, the financial line of business users
were ready to use the new platform first though they had higher risks compared to other users.
