This section provides some high level discussion about mapping and loading legacy data to the system's staging tables.

Unless in a Cloud installation, you can use any method you prefer to load data from your legacy application. However, we recommend that you investigate your database's mass load utility (as opposed to using insert statements) as the mechanism to load the staging tables. In addition, we strongly recommend that you disable the indexes on these tables before populating these tables and then enable the indexes after populating these tables.

Some tables in the staging database have keys that are system-assigned random numbers. Special consideration should be given when populating these keys. Refer to A Note About Keys for more information on how to properly populate these tables. Those tables that don't have system-assigned random numbers have keys that are a concatenation of the parent's prime-key plus one or more additional fields.

There are many maintenance objects that include a characteristic table used to capture miscellaneous information about the object. Most of these tables include an indexed column used when searching by characteristic value called Search Characteristic Value. During conversion and depending on the type of characteristic, this column must be populated as follows: