Towards the industrialization of data migration: Concepts and patterns for standard software implementation projects

Abstract

When a bank replaces its core-banking information system, the bank must migrate data like accounts from the old into the new system. Migrating data is necessary but not a catalyst for new business opportunities. The consequence is cost pressure to be addressed by an efficient software development process together with an industrialization of the development. Industrialization requires defining the deliverables. Therefore, our data migration architecture extends the ETL process by migration objectives to be reached in each step. Industrialization also means standardizing the implementation, e.g. with patterns. We present data migration patterns describing the typical transformations found in the data migration application domain. Finally, testing is an important issue because test-case based testing cannot guarantee that not a single customer gets lost. Reconciliation can do so by checking whether each object in the old and new system has a counterpart in the other system. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.