One of the most common types of micro tool that I am called upon to develop is a tool for migrating data from one database system to another. Often, businesses will change their back end system and need to migrate their data to a new database server or a new schema. This can cause a real headache for the business because of the amount of valuable data that needs to be moved.
Sometimes the migration is a simple one to one movement of data because it is simply a database upgrade or server migration. More often, however, the migration is complex, requiring the remapping of data from one table to one or more tables.
When the migration is completed, you need to make sure that the data has been moved across correctly, that the information hasn’t been truncated, that the relationships between the data are maintained, etc..
Occasionally, this is done in stages and you want to make sure that you catch errors in translation as soon as they happen.
The tools that I have developed, in the past, go beyond the simple “row count” validation, but go right down into the guts of the databases and validate row by row, field by field. Once you decommission your old database server, it can be very costly to restore the data to correct errors or worse, pay your employees to re-key the data manually!
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