For the last two weeks, I have been working with a vendor to migrate our financials from Oracle to SQL Server using SQL Server Migration Assistant. This has been a time-consuming process, which requires an extreme attention to detail as precious data hangs in the balance.

We have found numerous pieces of ‘bad data’ where either Oracle or the application allowed date such as 03/02/0007. These dates are allowed to migrate to SQL Server when using a datetime2 with precision 0, however the vendor requested to use datetime originally which ranges from 1/1/1753 to 12/31/9999, thus causing migration errors.

Here is the dilemma, do you modify data for financials that have closed to have clean data or leave data as is? The DBA in me says to clean the data and make everything pristine before you move it into my SQL Servers, however there are implications with financials and the department made the decision to import as is to ensure data was identical and unmodified. That I can certify, well the vendor will need to certify that as they have chosen the column type conversion fields that work with their application’s SQL Server version.

This conversion is a critical piece in my plan for global domination, well that is my plan to destroy our dependence on Oracle and move solely to SQL Server especially since we are a dot NET development shop. When this project is successful and users see better performance then we will be able to migrate other databases as well and we will see better performance! Enjoy.