We recently visited Microsoft Reactor to talk about database migration paths, common pain points and best practices. Our CEO, Alex, shared his firsthand experiences and customer stories. While the session was focused on migrations to Azure Cosmos DB, most learnings are transferable to other migrations paths:
Pick a tool that makes the process easy, fast and repeatable
Paradox: a 10-hour migration is much longer than 10x 1-hour migrations
Assign a migration "champion"
One technical person responsible for the planning and project execution
Get a one-time prod data load as soon as possible to the destination for testing
Can be a redacted sample. But needs to be truly representative in terms of size and form of the data that you will be migrating
Keep things as simple as possible with few moving parts in the process.
Doing something complex might be exciting and is good material for a blog post, but in production best things are usually boring.
Do dry-runs. Lots of them.
If your dry run is a long and painful process with an uncertain outcome, your production run will be even worse.
Over-provision on the destination as much as possible for the migration.
Write throughput on the destination is typically the biggest bottleneck for large datasets.
Adiom is Microsoft's trusted partner for migration solutions that enable seamless online database migrations from MongoDB to Cosmos DB vCore, and DynamoDB to Cosmos DB for NoSQL.
For more information on these migrations, visit the Quickstart page in our documentation: https://docs.adiom.io/getting-started/quickstart
Session recording and slides:
