Posted by admin, Thu Mar 02 02:18:18 UTC 2006

java.net: Agile Legacies: Using Iterative Methods to Import Legacy Data

Indeed, importing legacy data is a crucial part of most software projects. It is also a task that rarely evokes a great deal of enthusiasm among developers. And yet it is of vital importance for the end user. These old databases often contain years of valuable business records that the user needs to access from the new application.

This is an interesting article. Since I’ve been working with Ruby for the past few months, I was reading this through my Ruby glasses ;-) and decided it was interesting to note that although Ruby on Rails developers tend to be focused on new development with new databases, there are built-in features of Rails that are particularly well suited to solving the problem of importing legacy data. ActiveRecord makes referencing existing data seem like a walk in the park. And the Migrations stuff is really tailor-made for the task of massaging databases and their contents into new forms.

The great part about this is that you can use Ruby to do it, because it’s usually a “one-shot” sort of task, and the code will not be an integral part of the production system, so who cares what language you use to accomplish this goal? So, if you are a Java programmer, and you’d like to take Ruby out for a spin in a “real world” kind of way, think of using it for your next legacy data migration task. Who knows? You might even have fun doing it…

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