Iterative Conversion

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.

Comments

FatherOfF2 said…
Dear Stu,

I'd like to ask you a question about iterative conversion. If there are 3 areaa. Is it possible to convert first Area 1 then Go Live. During that Area 2 and Area 3 operate normally using old system.
Next Month we convert Area 2 then Go Live.
At this point Area 1 & 2 Go Live using new system and Area 3 operates using old system.
Next following month we convert Area 3 then Go Live.
All areas are using new system
Stuart Ramage said…
David,

It is certainly possible to take this approach, and the ConversionCentral tool handles this method automatically. The complexity normally arises in the extraction of the subsets of data from the source systems, and potential cross-over of the data used by these subsystems.

If your categories listed as Area 1,2 and 3, refer to Customer subdivisions then you should be able to filter your source data such that only these subsets of accounts,sites and transaction data elements are extracted, but if the areas that you make reference to are actually business areas (i.e. Collections, Revenue, Billing, etc) then the process becomes a little more complicated, since you would need to maintain the core data (i.e. the V elements) in both source and target systems during the cut-over period.

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