A Model-Driven Approach to Enterprise Data Migration

In a typical data migration project, analysts identify the mappings between source and target data models at a conceptual level using informal textual descriptions. An implementation team translates these mappings into programs that migrate the data. While doing so, the programmers have to understand how the conceptual models and business rules map to physical databases. We propose a modeling mechanism where we can specify conceptual models, physical models and mappings between them in a formal manner. We can also specify rules on conceptual models. From these models and mappings, we can automatically generate a program to migrate data from source to target. We can also generate a program to migrate data access queries from source to target. The overall approach results in a significant improvement in productivity and also a significant reduction in migration errors.