We often speak to customers whose databases have grown substantially over time and then fallen out of day to day use; often as these systems have been replaced or moved. Retrieving that data from DDS tables can prove time consuming and identifying the “wheat from the chaff” to achieve modern KPI style dashboards is just not a reality for many IT departments. In our experience this happens as legacy systems fall out of use because the documentation is lost, or never existed, and the expert knowledge of the database was lost as people moved on to other projects, retired or left the organisation.
In recent projects, Redbourn Business Systems has been commissioned to build and present industry standard Data Dictionary and Entity Relationship Diagrams that can help other technical users understand the primary tables, database relationships and any built in referential integrity. Such projects usually start with a Take On Analysis and Health Check/Review, leading to a fixed price project with a clearly defined endpoint. These projects have been followed by data migration exercises, taking summary data to other platforms (such as SQL Server) to allow for Data Warehouse style reporting, whilst retaining data on the IBMi.
Occasionally we have been commissioned to move data entirely from the IBMi platform and migrate it over to other databases, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. with appropriate controls built into the project to ensure that no data is lost. These Legacy Data Migration projects require expertise in both legacy database design and implementation and also modern database tools; skills that the team at Redbourn Business Systems have in place.
