Identify the Reasons for Migration
When beginning a database migration project, it is important to identify the
key reasons to the organization for migration and their prioritization. This will
help the organization speak a common language in later phases about how to
select a target cloud platform, target database and the necessary tools to facil-
itate migration. The most common reasons organizations turn to migrating to
alternative databases are:
• Cost Savings – As with any IT organization, cost savings are critical as
budgets continue to get squeezed. Large spending on licenses and sup-
port contracts is often a target for evaluation. The elimination of Oracle
has yielded multi-million-dollar savings for large organizations, even
after the cost of migration is factored in.
• Avoiding Vendor Lock In – Many new applications today are deployed
using tools and design methods to make the database and other compo-
nents easier to replace, should a vendor change course or a new vendor
jump into the market.
• Adoption of a Cloud-first Mindset – As organizations look to eliminate
highly capital-intensive IT assets, a cloud-first mindset is being used to
drive workload to more cost efficient and flexible platforms.
• Agility for Application Teams – Application teams continue to ask for
more flexibility to rapidly deploy non-prod environments and updates to
production environments, without long lead times.
Inevitably there will be objections across the organization for these types of com-
plex, high touch changes to the IT infrastructure. The focus should be to ensure
the organization has functional parity for the business users post migration, and
avoid trying to map feature to feature from the source to target environments.
Identify Target Applications
When identifying target applications to migrate to new database platforms, the
key is to evaluate the rewards of the migration, against your previously identified
goals and the risk to business operations associated with the migration. Figure 2
outlines the common design patterns and the risk associated with each category
of application if you are to migrate from Oracle to alternative databases.
The other element of identifying target applications for migration is to identify
design patterns and features that are being used that will be more complex to
migrate and possibly require remediation during the migration process. These
can span a wide range of elements in complex environments, the most com-
mon ones that should be accounted for are:
• Business Logic in the Database – It is common in many organizations to
keep business logic in the database layer, as triggers and stored proce-
dures. To facilitate lower risk migrations and improved longer term appli-
cation architectures, this logic should be moved to the application tier.
16 | THE DOPPLER | SPRING 2017