Well it might surprise you to learn that I got no closer to last week's chore of creating the perfect definition of Data Migration than what I started with. But I guess we all feel Data Migration exists as a specific problem domain and we all want to contribute to its better understanding, so having whetted our appetite with the challenge of definition let's get started on the meat of the problem.
Please let me know the top issues you encounter during your data migration projects. Just like last week I'll kick the ball into play with one of my own - the dreaded semantic issue:
There you are, three (or less) weeks away from go-live, when suddenly out of left field comes a value (or a lack of a value) in a column that just shouldn't be there.
You know the sort of thing. "But I was told that all invoice id's were numeric, yet here are 10% of them with a two letter prefix. Are they all wrong? Or is there some rule of which I was unaware? What does it all mean?"
Late emerging semantic issues can be project killers and they also get to the heart of the Data Migration problem domain. So that's my nomination!
Once we have a list we'll (that is I will) put them in some sort of order and we can work through them together.
Look forward to hearing from you all.
