Practical Data Migration [Paperback]

This book is an awesome first edition, simply and litterally awesome. Great thought leadership brought to a book that can educate many on the topic of Migration Strategy. There absolutely needs to be a second edition that expands the book with sample templates of the artifacts that are described in the book to allow and individual just starting to follow the methods in the book to success and also more details of the QA and cutover planning area would be helpful. Well worth the read, for me the book represented one of the thought provoking reads I have had this year!

Hopefully the second edition is on its way!

I found myself (vigorously) nodding in agreement on virtually every page of this book, an indispensable distillation of years of experience and insight. The situations and scenarios Morris describes often hit so close to home that I had to wonder if he hadn't secretly been on some of the same projects I have and/or listening in on the meetings! If you are a practitioner in the data quality, MDM, ETL, data conversion/migration/consolidation/integration, etc., space you owe it to yourself **and your clients** to read this book--you and your projects will be more successful for having done so.

At the time this was written there was nothing like this available and John Morris set out to bring some order to the topic of Data Migration (hereinafter referred to as `DM'). Here is a DM survival guide, both for the novice and the seasoned professional, with large and small suggestions for the successful completion of the DM task.

Some of this is common sense, whilst other parts are bringing an element of proportion and order to what is already available as standard practice or standard wisdom in the IT world. Key for Morris is his 4 Golden Rules. He suggests that these are committed to memory by practitioners, and (sometimes annoyingly for this reader of poor memory) wisely keeps subsequently saying that we should remember Golden Rule #3 - without saying what that is. What are his 4 Golden Rules? - I will leave you to read the book.

Morris suggests that a DM project should be seen as a separate project, even if it is closely coupled with the development and implementation of a new (replacement) application. At the start, there needs to be a DM strategy; Morris defines this by using five `rights': How you are going to get the right data from the right sources of the right quality to the right place at the right time. He suggests that we should move away from `How do we migrate this data?' to `What data do we migrate?'

There is a common sense approach, even questioning the criticality of timing. Usually, when dealing with DM, the time is fixed (lying within the Window of Opportunity). It is therefore only Cost, Quality and Features that can be varied. However, if it has taken 18 months of planning to get to the actual migration point, shaving minutes off run-times may not be THAT important.

Amongst other matters, Morris stresses that there may be hidden data stores, even those that break internal company standards. Start by declaring a data store amnesty, and end by ensuring that data stores that have been fully migrated are killed-off. Dead, and no longer used. He also advocates that settled issues are not re-opened. How I wish I had seen that advice followed!

The final part of the book goes through a hypothetical DM project, detailing the actions at each stage, and tellingly concludes with real actions that you can implement if you are parachuted into a failing DM project. Interesting and informative reading, and it should prove useful if it subsequently applies to you.

I will conclude with two little tit-bits from Morris' writings. Don't have large documents to get signed-off, but lots of little deliverables, that are signed-off on the way. Finally, it is better to talk of `data preparation' than `data cleansing'. To you, the two terms are synonymous, but there is no emotion behind the former, whereas the latter is charged with judgement.

Peter Morgan, Bath, UK (...)

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