Third time is the charm

July 29th, 2010 by Serguei Alleko, Tags: ,
Posted in Information Technologies| 2 Comments »

And the third time I’m importing the same database over and over again. On step 3 of 5 I found some inconsistencies. It looks like we have a lot of contact details with missing data.

The biggest problems is that people don’t want to fill the information. They don’t care about internal structure (well, it’s not their structure, after all, it’s just mine).

So even if you set up some fields as “mandatory” in the forms, people will come with huge XLS-sheets of data to import. Where, of course, there will be no structure and a lot of data missing. You have to implement nazi-style policies in order to keep the information available for analysis

Well, the good thing is that after the migration the data will be clean after all.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/truedrcb Artem Gratchev

    I'd say that migrating old data into new structure in 3 attempts – is unbelievable luck :)

    Recently I have managed migration of about 90% old data after at least 50 attempts and a week of preparation and bug analysis. To prevent bugs and foresee problems in the rest 10% data I'd required at least 3 times more time. So we finally decided to stop attempting and just save error logs.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Serguei-Alleko/1832845198 Serguei Alleko

    MWA-HA-HA!

    Customer data: accounts, main and additional contacts, notes and account relationships are migrated after 4 attempts!
    Now only orders remain.

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