This should really be a Tweet, but I guess I'm writing a bit more. In theme of data migration and legacy modernization, I am seeing more and more of a push to consolidate data sources, especially from non-oracle to oracle in an effort to save dollars.

From a modernization perspective, this fits in quite well. We are able to migrate things like Terradata, Sybase and DB2 and put that all into an Oracle database and then provide that as a OaaS (Oracle as a Service) Cloud offering.

This seems to be a growing trend, and not unlike the cool RDS Amazon Database cloud being built on Oracle as well.

We again find ourselves back in the similar theme of migration, however. The target technology sounds like a winner (COBOL to Java/SOA...DB2/Datacom/Adabas to Oracle) but the age-old problem of how to get there still persists.

It it not trivial to migrate large amounts of pre-relational or "devolved" relational data. To do this, we again must revert back to a tight roadmap to migration and leverage the growing tools and services that we have.

I'm working on a couple of new sections and chapters for a book that Tom and Prakash and I are writing around Database Migration and Consolidation. I'll share some snipits shortly.