Business Intelligence Challenge – Product Upgrades & Migrations, Moving the Code – 4

Last time we discussed about Impact Assessment , the next logical step after this is to perform the actual upgrade or migration of the code.

Moving the Code: Performing Upgrade or Migration of the Objects

When we talk about product upgrades, always the product vendor provides tools by which the objects in the earlier version can be upgraded to the latest version. Yes we would see some objects failing through while using such tools; these are the ones that would need rework after the upgrade process.

When we talk about product migration like moving from Cognos to Business Objects or Business Objects to Cognos, there is good scope for us to look for some ways to automate the code migration. Earlier discussions have been on how to leverage the metadata for understanding the environment, now we are looking at an option on how to manipulate or transform the metadata so that an object in platform ‘A’ becomes compliant to platform ‘B’.

Steps involved in building an automated product migration process

Perform metadata level object mapping between the two platforms, determine the gaps. This would actually be a ‘by product’ of ‘Step 2’ in Impact Assessment

Build individual components that would

• Read the metadata from the source platform and prepare a repository
• Have the knowledge of the match & gap between the platforms, could be reference tables
• Transform the ‘source’ metadata and write out as understood by the ‘target’ platform by using the reference tables

Benefits of Automated Migration

• Helps avoid creation of objects from scratch
• Ensures availability of time for testing (core task) than code development
• Enables team to have a flexible skillset
• A faster way of delivering things when a ‘one to one’ migration from the source platform is seen as a must

Automated Migration Challenges

Transforming the source metadata to the target platform would be a challenge, especially with data manipulation functions. Having a good understanding of the gaps will help; a reference table mapping the functions between the platforms would be useful. In scenarios where a function cannot be converted to the target platform, a comment can be written into a log file enabling quicker attention.

Have seen good success in writing such automated migration components though not 100%. With almost every products providing good SDK kits for reading and as well writing metadata and as well with the support for XML structures, writing such bridges for object migration are getting easier.

Whether the objects in a product are migrated/upgraded in an automated way or not, the following activity of ‘Validation’ plays a key role in ensuring the final quality, next time let us discuss on some of the means for effective validation ….

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Business Intelligence Challenge – Product Upgrades & Migrations Product Upgrades & Migrations, Object Consolidation – 2

As an initial step one of the key tasks to be considered in any Business Intelligence product upgrade or migration is ‘Object Consolidation’.

What is Object Consolidation? The process of getting to understand the current BI environment by means of the metadata and analysing them with a perspective to determine and eliminate redundant objects. The ‘object’ in a BI product would be its reports and the semantic layer definitions (like Universe in Business Objects).

Steps Involved in Object Consolidation

1. Locate all objects (reports and semantic definitions). These objects could be from a central repository and as well from individual user folders and desktops

2. Check whether the Object’s metadata are available in a relational storage (metadata repository) else build processes that would collect the metadata of the objects and store them into a relational structure

3. Run SQL queries against the relational structure to determine
a.‘Duplicates’; the objects that have same metadata elements
b.‘Clusters’; the objects that have similar metadata elements. when objects(reports) differ between them by a few 1 or 2
metadata elements then these Objects are grouped as ‘Clusters’
c. ‘ Dormant’; the objects that are no longer used
d. Complexity of the objects in terms of factors like the number of metadata elements being used in an object

4. Share the object consolidation findings to the users for confirmation and verification

5. By eliminating the duplicate & dormant and including only the prime in a cluster prepare the consolidated list of objects
a.Duplicate objects are directly removed
b.From the Cluster objects only the key object is considered for upgrade. After the upgrade of the key object rest of the
objects in the same cluster are derived from this upgraded key object

The consolidated list of objects and the understanding of the complexity of the existing environment becomes one of the key inputs to plan for the upgrade process.

Benefits of Object Consolidation

1. Eliminating upgrade of unwanted objects, saving on effort & cost
2. Enabling to build a clean system in the newer version or platform ensuring easier system maintenance
3. Enables effective upgrade planning based on the understanding of the environment
4. Improves the understanding of the existing environment through the metadata links

Object Consolidation Challenge: Accessing the metadata of the objects would be a challenge since many of the BI products don’t expose the metadata that can be queried through SQLs. But almost every products provide SDK kits through which the metadata can be accessed or expose the metadata as XML files. We would need to build tools that can pull the metadata using SDKs or in the cases of XML files build XML readers/parsers to pull the required metadata.

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