Preparing Environment for Conversion

Preparing an environment for conversion involves the following:

Set Up Conversion Security

Conversion activities comprise massive data manipulations and database operations such as disabling / enabling indexes, truncating tables, and other operations. Whoever works on the conversion project deals with the real client's data and may have access to sensitive customer information. Therefore it is important to determine implementer's roles and responsibilities in advance, and to provide the user with the appropriate authorization level.

Use the pre-configured user groups Conversion Administration, Conversion Development, and Conversion Operations, along with the corresponding Template Users K1CNVADM, K1CNVDEV and K1CNVOPR. Alternatively, design and define your own conversion user authorization setup.

Prepare Environment for Conversion

• Enable conversion activities in the environment.

• Run K1-CNVEN batch.

• Import the Conversion Data Upload Accelerator, if it was supplied by the application.

• Generate conversion artifacts.

• To generate artifacts for all eligible tables and/or maintenance objects, submit a batch job for the K1-CNVGA batch control and use batch parameters to specify the scope for the generation: everything, Tables only or Maintenance Objects only.

• As a result, new Conversion Task is generated for each Table and each Maintenance Object eligible for conversion. The artifacts are linked to the Conversion Tasks as attachments

• To generate artifacts for an individual table or maintenance object, select Admin, select Conversion Support, and select Generate Conversion Artifacts. Choose "Table" or "Maintenance Object" and run the generator.

• As a result, a new Conversion Task is generated for the selected table or maintenance object. The artifacts are linked to the Conversion Tasks as attachments.

• Query Conversion Tasks that were created for various Tables and Maintenance Objects and explore the generated artifacts:

• Input Data File Specifications. This file contains the detailed field by field formatting instructions and other notes about the expected contents of the input data file. Use these instructions when preparing the legacy data extract.

• Control File. This file is used by SQL Loader during the data upload

• File List. This file lists the name of the input files that has to be prepared for the data upload.

• Multiple data files for a single object (Table or Maintenance Object) are expected if the data is being uploaded contains CLOB columns AND the upload is configured to load CLOB from secondary file.

• Switch schema to redirect the application to the staging data area.

• Use the menu to navigate to the generator by selecting Admin, then selecting Conversion Support.

• Truncate tables in the staging data area to ensure that you will be uploading the data into clean empty tables.

• Disable indexes in the staging data area. This is required because SQL Loader is not capable of implicitly disabling partitioned indexes during the data upload

• Disable triggers in the staging data area.

The environment is now ready for the legacy data upload:

• Conversion is enabled

• SQL Loader Control Files have been generated, and

• Synonyms in the database schema point to the staging data area tables.

Notes:

• Conversion activities are possible as long as conversion is enabled in the environment. Once the legacy data is successfully migrated, you should disable conversion by running the K1-CNVDS batch. By doing this you set an internal indicator that is queried by conversion-related processes, such as switch schema, data upload, table cleanup, and index/statistics update. These processes will only run when conversion is enabled.

Important: The Disable Conversion process should be executed ONLY ONCE right before the system is ready for go live. It is one-time event and is irreversible. Once disabled, conversion activities cannot be fully re-enabled as the assumption is that the re-enabling is happening while the application is running live in production. Enabling conversion after it has been disabled will result in the application running in the Incremental Conversion mode with its limitations.

• Switching the schema sets an internal flag that indicates whether the synonyms are pointing to "staging" or "production" area. The data upload is only allowed when the application is running in a "staging" mode.

• It is recommended to perform truncate operations at the maintenance object level as it will prevent leaving orphan records in the database. When truncating tables one by one always truncate child tables first.