Data Migration, the SAP WAY!

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In this blog I'm going to focus on data migration and how we can achieve this with data services.

So when thinking about data migration many people will have heard about the concept, know roughly what the term is about. But they won't really know the nuts and bolts or how it actually works in the SAP world.

So lets first look at what data migration means, here is an explanation that I extracted from wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_migration

Data migration is the process of transferring data between storage types, formats, or computer systems. Data migration is usually performed programmatically to achieve an automated migration, freeing up human resources from tedious tasks. It is required when organizations or individuals change computer systems or upgrade to new systems, or when systems merge (such as when the organizations that use them undergo a merger or takeover).

To achieve an effective data migration procedure, data on the old system is mapped to the new system providing a design for data extraction and data loading. The design relates old data formats to the new system's formats and requirements. Programmatic data migration may involve many phases but it minimally includes data extraction where data is read from the old system and data loading where data is written to the new system.

So in the SAP world this is used mostly when a customer has one of the followings scenarios

• Has several SAP systems that they would like to merge into one central SAP system
• Going live with SAP solution and would like to migrate data from legacy system to the new SAP solution

Now many people might think that the task is simple enough because you can just insert the data into the SAP database. But this is not the case as we need to ensure the data is consistent and that all business rules need to be applied to the data. So when doing tthe data migration we need to send the data to the SAP application which will either accept the data or reject the data if not correct, SAP will only accept the data if the data is in an accepatble format and passes all validation rules, once SAP accepts the data the data will then be stored in the database.

Below is a video clip that explains data migration, but most importantly the SAP way!

For more info follow me on twitter @louisdegouveia :smile: