Data migration
Post-migration: After data migration, results are subjected to data verification to determine whether data was accurately translated, is complete, and supports processes in the new system. During verification, there may be a need for a parallel run of both systems to identify areas of disparity and forestall erroneous data loss. Additional documentation and reporting of the migration project is conducted, and once the migration is validated complete, legacy systems may also be decommissioned. Migration close-out meetings will officially end the migration process.
Extract, transform, load
In other cases, one or more of the following transformation types may be required to meet the business and technical needs of the server or data warehouse:The load phase loads the data into the end target, which may be a simple delimited flat file or a data warehouse. Depending on the requirements of the organization, this process varies widely. Some data warehouses may overwrite existing information with cumulative information; updating extracted data is frequently done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Other data warehouses (or even other parts of the same data warehouse) may add new data in a historical form at regular intervals — for example, hourly. To understand this, consider a data warehouse that is required to maintain sales records of the last year. This data warehouse overwrites any data older than a year with newer data. However, the entry of data for any one year window is made in a historical manner. The timing and scope to replace or append are strategic design choices dependent on the time available and the business needs. More complex systems can maintain a history and audit trail of all changes to the data loaded in the data warehouse.