OCLC's WebJunction.org Data Migration
Workstate's role in OCLC's Webjunction initiative was to ensure that the end user experience was continuous and untroubled as they began using their newly developed platform. All user preferences, community interactions and course work were seamlessly moved and kept in sync over the course of the eight month project.
Assignment
Migrate user, message board, and CMS data for the WebJunction application.
Audience
WebJunction application users (30,000+)
Opportunity
OCLC had a need to quickly and efficiently migrate a large amount of supporting data to a new application without disrupting the current development efforts.
Challenge
The WebJunction application was being upgraded to a completely different application platform, which did not support using the existing Oracle database schemas and file system objects. The Oracle database contents from multiple schemas were to be migrated to a single MySQL database schema. Also, user information had to be pre-created in the new system from existing LDAP data to enable existing users to access the new application with as little re-registration as possible.
Differences between the architecture of the two systems, and increased complexity in the new application called for the use of application API calls to properly inject the content into the new system. This posed challenges of its own, due to the rapidly changing API code and feature set of the new application.
Content URLs used by the earlier system had to be supported in the new system to allow embedded links and user bookmarks to continue to function. This required the generation of cross-reference data to allow the new system to be able to find the same content in the new system using information from the earlier system.
Finally, Workstate needed to fulfill these objectives in a cost-effective manor, while keeping high-level OCLC staff apprised of the process and progress of the project.
Results
Workstate gathered information from the WebJunction management team for each type of data to be migrated, in order to manage expectations and provide full transparency into our processes. The key was to ensure that WebJunction internal staff had enough transparency into the various stages of the migration to feel confident that their concerns were being met, and their data was safe. To this end, Workstate built a temporary, throw-away web interface to enable harvesting of portions of the data needed for the migration, as well as provide an interface to quickly indicate the progress of work.
Workstate wrote custom migration scripts in JAVA, using JDBC to pull data from the earlier system, and existing application API calls to push the data to the new system. Existing WebJunction libraries were leveraged to process the LDAP user information used to pre-populate user profiles in the new system.