Iterative Conversion
- by stuart ramage
Question Received: I am toying with the idea of migrating the current
information first and the remainder of the history at a later date. I
have heard that the conversion tool copes with this, but haven't found
any information on how it does.
Answer:
The Toolkit will support iterative conversions as long as the original
master data key tables (the CK_* tables) are not cleared down from
Staging (the already converted Transactional Data would need to be
cleared down) and the Production instance being migrated into is
actually Production (we have migrated into a pre-prod instance in the
past and then unloaded this and loaded it into the real PROD instance,
but this will not work for your situation. You need to be migrating
directly into your intended environment). In this case the migration
tool will still know all about the original keys and the generated keys
for the primary objects (Account, SA, etc.) and as such it will be able
to link the data converted as part of a second pass onto these entities.
It
should be noted that this may result in the original opening balances
potentially being displayed with an incorrect value (if we are talking
about Financial Transactions) and also that care will have to be taken
to ensure that all related objects are aligned (eg. A Bill must have a
set to bill segments, meter reads and a financial transactions, and
these entities cannot exist independantly).
It
should also be noted that subsequent runs of the conversion tool would
need to be 'trimmed' to ensure that they are only doing work on the
objects affected. You would not want to revalidate and migrate all
Person, Account, SA, SA/SP, SP and Premise details since this
information has already been processed, but you would definitely want to
run the affected transactional record validation and keygen processes.
There
is no real "hard-and-fast" rule around this processing since is it
specific to each implmentations needs, but the majority of the effort
required should be detailed in the Conversion Tool section of the online
help (under Adminstration/ The Conversion Tool). The major rule is to
ensure that you only run the steps and validation/keygen steps that you
need and do not do a complete rerun for your subsequent conversion.
