All About Data Migration Considerations

Organizations have some systems that they have been using for years in traditional technology, and they are outdated, making it difficult to change or simply maintain them, so organisations go through app modernization, where they decide to redevelop the same system in latest modern technology, making it easier to maintain.

Another reason for modernization is that we continue to develop the same monolithic application, which becomes legacy day by day, and maintaining the app becomes a nightmare, forcing us to redevelop the applications.

Related: Using Mendix to Modernize your Legacy App

Once you’ve decided to redevelop the application and created the logic, the time comes to migrate the data from the legacy system to the new app.

In Third scenario, when changing the domain model in an existing Mendix application or refactoring your app, there will be changes in the domain model or entities and associations, and you will need to migrate from the old form to the new structure.

So, before migrating these data to Mendix, you must consider and examine several factors. Analyse the existing data and determine how it will be transformed for use in the Mendix app.

The legacy system may contain data in the form of:

• RDBMS
• NO SQL Data

The data migration process is divided into three steps. Data extraction, transformation, and loading in Mendix App

Here are a few use cases for data migration from RDBMS to Mendix

• Assume you have an application with data stored in RDBMS such as Oracle or MySQL, and you need to replicate that data into the Mendix app.
• Another use case is when we have master data in the Mendix application that comes from another application and needs to be kept up to always date.

Solution for First Use Case

When we are migrating the Data from NO SQL to Mendix

Use Case – Assume you have one application with data in MongoDB, and you have redeveloped the application in Mendix low-code platform, and you now need to migrate the data into Mendix.

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• Which of the following collections will be transformed into which entity?
• How is data related in MongoDB that must be mapped to an association?
• How are you going to read data from an existing database?
• Can you use the connectors, or do you need to customize them?

Once you’ve answered all the questions, you can proceed with the migration in three simple steps.

• Gather the data.
• Convert or transform the data to Mendix entities.
• Load the data and then
  • a. Extract the data.

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When we migrate the data from Same Mendix App?

When the domain model in the existing app is changed, you will need to migrate to avoid losing data. Because you can’t remove the old associations or attributes from the entities because they contain data, you can rename them as old and then perform the migration, after which this can be deleted.

• You can achieve the same result by writing Conversion Microflows. You must write the logic to transform the data to the new structure, read the data from the old structure and change the association to the new structure, and map the attribute to new entities. You can include this microflow in the After Start-up microflow or manually trigger it once.
• You can also do the same thing with the Database migration Marketplace module. This module employs the Liquibase database solution, in which the microflow will be executed once during the deployment for one database, and it will retain the state of the migration and will not be executed again.

Indium’s Mendix experts collaborate closely with our customers to analyse existing infrastructure and identify mission-critical apps that need to be updated, replaced, repurposed, or reused. This simplifies migration, allowing businesses to modernise quickly to minimise disruption and maximise resources.

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