Migrating a Large amount of data from old publishing site to new site

Question

Hi,

I am currently in the process of creating a new news/publishing site on the Movable Type platform. There are around 20 or so sites with 20,000+ rows of data to be moved/aggregated to ~8 sites (we have a number of location specific sites and are going to aggregate the content from these into 1 single site for each niche).

We have discussed how to do this and came to the conclusion that it would probably be better to hire somebody outside of our company to do it (I could probably do it, but i'm limited on time and am sure that a specialist would be more efficient). So my questions to you guys are:

1) What kind of skill set should we look for in an applicant?

2) There will be a large amount of input from our side... is getting somebody to work remotely out of the question?

3) How long would a task like this traditionally take (I know this question is very subjective, but an estimation would be awesome)?

4) Do you have any recommendations for firms who would be able to take on a large task like this?

Thanks in advance,

Tom

Answer 1

I would look for someone with ETL experience. Strong programming experience in the database you are moving to as well as the one you are migrating from if they are different.

This would seem to be a relatively small job to me (we migrate millions of rows from one datbase to another), but determining how long would require a look at the structures you have in place. If both databases have the same design structure, it is relatively simple, if you must change how the data is stored, it becomes more difficult.

The most critical part is someone who will recognize the need to make sure that record identifiers will likely have to change (unlesss you use GUIDs) and who will talk about how he or she intends to handle that in the interview without being prompted (I'd ask what approach the person would take to doing the migration). I also would feel more secure hiring someone who mentioned that everything should be backed up before the data migration starts and who will want you to do it first on dev and then deploy using scripts.

Pretty much any agency would be willing to give you resumes for contract workers who could do this task. Interview them like you would a permanent employee, make it clear the contract is not a temp to permanent position and you should be fine.