A Practical Approach for Modernization of Legacy Systems

The successful migration of the legacy data stored in the old data formats is a challenging issue with respect to backward compatibility and future extendibility. Currently, in most migration projects, converting all legacy data objects (traditionally stored in flat and indexed files) to RDBMS tables is considered to be unrealistic and out of question because of the expected performance problems. While in our experience, those legacy data objects have to be converted to the modern database (RDBMS) tables and fully integrated in the Global Information System schema. In order to guarantee performance, efficiency, share ability and ease of future enhancements, the legacy data has to be fully normalized too. This paper examines the issues concerning the migration of legacy data objects to RDMS