Data migration best practices

We’ve talked a lot about some of the features of the data migration and management parts of the project. There are lots that we haven’t talked about as well. But one thing that we need to discuss is Microsoft’s best practices for data management. There are several of them, and we’ll discuss each one, including my comments and recommendations for each one. These recommendations have been accumulated from my and fellow SAs’ projects.

First and foremost, never ever use the production environment to test data migration. The data should be put into a backup system or database, if possible, and use that system to the data extraction parts of the migration tasks. Also, a Tier 2 system should be used for the majority of the development of the data packages. Once you’ve tested the data against backup and test environments and you’ve validated everything, when go-live comes, you can use the data packages against...