Cloud Data Middleware for Legacy Schema Migration
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Higher education institutions face challenges in managing large quantities of data due to limited skills, budget, and resources, along with bureaucratic hurdles, leading to complex, time-consuming, and expensive data migrations, and a lack of interoperability between technologies.
Innovation Solution
A cloud-based data management system that merges legacy databases with different data schemas into a principal data store using unstructured databases, providing a flexible, vendor-agnostic, intelligent data management middleware platform, enabling seamless data integration and processing across multiple systems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If strict field-to-field migration is used to merge legacy databases with different data schemas, then data integrity and structure consistency are improved, but data duplication occurs and flexibility is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an unstructured database as an intermediary layer between legacy databases with different schemas and the principal data store. This intermediary absorbs the schema differences and allows flexible data storage without requiring strict field-to-field mapping, thereby preventing data duplication while maintaining integrity through the mediation of the unstructured database layer.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the data storage parameter from structured/relational to unstructured format. By storing data in unstructured databases rather than forcing it into rigid schemas, the system can accommodate varying data formats from different legacy systems without duplication, while still maintaining data integrity through controlled access layers.
2Manufacturing precision
If complex data migration processes are implemented to handle multiple legacy databases, then data integration quality is improved, but migration time and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the data migration process into distinct phases: extracting data from legacy databases, storing it in unstructured databases as intermediate representations, and then merging into the principal data store. This segmentation allows parallel processing and simplifies each individual step, reducing overall migration time while maintaining integration quality.
Solution Approach 2:
The unstructured database serves as a migration intermediary that simplifies the transfer process. Instead of directly mapping complex field-to-field relationships between multiple legacy databases, the unstructured database acts as a buffer that accepts data in various formats and presents it uniformly to the principal data store, thereby reducing migration complexity and time.
3Reliability
If vendor-specific data management tools are used to ensure compatibility, then system reliability is improved, but adaptability and interoperability decrease
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal data management approach using unstructured databases that can handle multiple data formats and schemas from different vendor systems. The unstructured database layer provides multi-functionality by accommodating diverse data types without requiring vendor-specific tools, thereby achieving both reliability through standardized access and adaptability through format flexibility.
Data Source
AI summary
This disclosure includes a process for merging legacy databases having different data schema into a principal data store. A computing device retrieves a legacy database from each of a plurality of domains of an organization to form a plurality of legacy databases, where at least two legacy databases in the plurality of legacy databases have a different data schema. For each of the plurality of legacy databases, the computing device retrieves data from the respective legacy database, places the data from the respective legacy database into a respective unstructured database, and merges the respective unstructured database into a principal data store designed to hold data for every domain of the plurality of domains.