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Outline

Title
Abstract
Introduction
Database Understanding Tools
Data Integration
Limitations of Migration Support Tools
The Database First Approach
Forward Database Gateway
The Database Last Approach
The Composite Database Approach
The Butterfly Methodology
Data Migration
Summary
References
All Topics
Psychology
Personality Psychology

A survey of research into legacy system migration

Profile image of DEIRDRE LAWLESSDEIRDRE LAWLESS

1997

Abstract

Legacy information systems typically form the backbone of the information flow within an organisation and are the main vehicle for consolidating information about the business. As a solution to the problems these systems posebrittleness, inflexibility, isolation, non-extensibility, lack of openness etc. -many companies are migrating their legacy systems to new environments which allow the information system to more easily adapt to new business requirements. This paper presents a survey of research into Migration of Legacy Information Systems. The main problems that companies with legacy systems must face are analysed, and the challenges possible solutions must solve discussed. The paper provides an overview of the most important currently available solutions, and their main downsides are

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Migration of Legacy Information System based on Business Process Theory
ghislain abessolo

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2011

The permanent evolution of needs and ICTs on the one hand and taking into account customer satisfaction on the other hand has lead companies to adapt their information systems. Taking these developments into account inevitably leads to the obsolescence of existing systems. In most cases, these legacy systems are not fully documented. This state of affairs renders the migration process very complex. The situation is much more complex in developing countries where only information systems are not documented but, also suffer from a lack of qualified staff capable of maintaining information systems. Till date, the work done in legacy information systems migration is based on documentation of these systems, but do not specify how the documentation was created. In this work, we propose an approach based on the theory of business process and workflows which systemizes reverse engineering of legacy information systems to provide the documentation necessary for migration

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Developing legacy system migration methods and tools for technology transfer
Rita Francese

Software: Practice and Experience, 2008

This paper presents the research results of an ongoing technology transfer project carried out in cooperation between the University of Salerno and a small software company. The project is aimed at developing and transferring migration technology to the industrial partner. The partner should be enabled to migrate monolithic multi-user COBOL legacy systems to a multi-tier Web-based architecture. The assessment of the legacy systems of the partner company revealed that these systems had a very low level of decomposability with spaghetti-like code and embedded control flow and database accesses within the user interface descriptions. For this reason, it was decided to adopt an incremental migration strategy based on the reengineering of the user interface using Web technology, on the transformation of interactive legacy programs into batch programs, and the wrapping of the legacy programs. A middleware framework links the new Web-based user interface with the Wrapped Legacy System. An Eclipse plug-in, named MELIS (migration environment for legacy information systems), was also developed to support the migration process. Both the migration strategy and the tool have been applied to two essential subsystems of the most business critical legacy system of the partner company.

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Legacy Migration as Planned Organizational Change
Panagiotis Kanellis

2004

Traditionally, legacy migration has been viewed as the simple replacement of aged or problematic hardware and software, including the applications, interfaces and databases that compose an information system infrastructure. Our position is that this view is outdated and is at best myopic taking into account that the role of technology is not merely supportive but today pervades every aspect of the way enterprises conduct their business. As such, our position is that migration should be approached as a planned change process that first and foremost requires an understanding and an approach that covers the range of issues and organisational entities involved. In this context, this paper presents such a structured approach that defines the landscape, deals with the semantics of legacy migration and, can be applied by organisations that recognise the need to manage the process in a controlled and not in a piecemeal and ad hoc fashion.

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DARWIN: On the Incremental Migration of Legacy Information Systems
Michael L Brodie, Michael Stonebraker

… Group, Technical Report TR-0222-10-92- …, 1993

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DARWIN: On the Incremental Migration of Legacy Information Systems 1
Michael L Brodie

1994

As is painfully evident today, the deterioration of the transportation, education 2 , and other national infrastructures negatively impacts many aspects of life, business, and our economy. This has resulted, in part, when responses to short term crises discourage investing in infrastructure enhancement and when there are no effective means for infrastructure evolution. This paper responds to the deterioration of the information system (IS) infrastructure that has strong negative impacts on ISs, on the organizations they support, and, ultimately, on the economy. This paper addresses the problem of legacy IS migration by methods that mediate between short term crises and long term goals. It presents an effective strategy and a spectrum of supporting methods for migrating legacy ISs into a target environment that includes rightsized hardware and modern technologies (i.e., infrastructure) such as a client-server architecture, DBMSs and CASE. We illustrate the methods with two migration case studies of multi-million dollar, mission critical legacy ISs. The contribution of this paper is a highly flexible set of migration methods that is tailorable to most legacy ISs and business contexts. The goal is to support continuous, iterative evolution. The critical success factor, and challenge in deployment, is to identify appropriate portions of the IS and the associated planning and management to achieve an incremental migration that is feasible with respect to the technical and business requirements. The paper concludes with a list of desirable migration tools for which basic research is required. The principles described in this paper can be used to design future ISs and an infrastructure that will support continuous IS evolution to avoid future legacy ISs.

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Legacy systems migration-a method and its tool-kit framework
Deirdre Lawless

… , 1997. Asia Pacific... …, 1997

The problems posed by mission-critical legacy systems -brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, non-extensibility, lack of openness etc. -are well known, but practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Most approaches are "ad hoc" and tailored to peculiarities of individual systems. This paper presents an approach to mission-critical legacy system migration : the Butterfly Methodology, its data migration engine and supporting tool-kit framework. Data migration is the primary focus of the Butterfly methodology, however, it is placed in the overall context of a complete legacy system migration. The fundamental premise of the Butterfly methodology is to question the need for parallel operation of the legacy and target systems during migration. Much of the complexity of the current migration methodologies is eliminated by removing this interoperation assumption.

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The butterfly methodology: A gateway-free approach for migrating legacy information systems
Deirdre Lawless

Engineering of …, 1997

The problems posed by mission-critical legacy systemse.g., brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, nonextensibility, lack of opennessare well known, but practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Generally, organisations attempt to keep their legacy systems operational, while developing mechanisms which allow the legacy systems to interoperate with new, modem systems which provide additional functionality. The most mature approach employs gateways to provide this interoperability.

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A practical approach for modernization of legacy systems
Farhad Oroumchian, Maseud Rahgozar

The successful migration of the legacy data stored in the old data formats is a challenging issue with respect to backward compatibility and future extendibility. Currently, in most migration projects, converting all legacy data objects (traditionally stored in flat and indexed files) to RDBMS tables is considered to be unrealistic and out of question because of the expected performance problems. While in our experience, those legacy data objects have to be converted to the modern database (RDBMS) tables and fully integrated in the Global Information System schema. In order to guarantee performance, efficiency, share ability and ease of future enhancements, the legacy data has to be fully normalized too. This paper examines the issues concerning the migration of legacy data objects to RDMS.

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