When you’re up to your ears in a database upgrade project, like an upgrade to Oracle 12c, you begin to look forward to little things.

Like going a few hours with no system notifications or text messages from your DevOps team.

Like buying lunch in the cafeteria and actually getting to eat it there, instead of at your desk.

Like getting home in time to watch Jeopardy! with the kids.

Of course, you could spend an entire career performing upgrades and running migration projects, and never hit all three of those, or any of your favorite little things. But looking forward to them is always the light at the end of the tunnel.

Home for dinner and Jeopardy!

If you want to achieve some of those little things while you’re in the middle of your migration or upgrade project, have a look at our new e-book, Simplify Your Migrations and Upgrades. We wrote it to give you some high-level perspective before you get bogged down in the project itself.

Part 1 takes you through some of the basics on avoiding risk, downtime and long hours, including the five common pitfalls that afflict most migration projects:

1. Poor planning — Before you jump in, analyze all your applications, processes and access requirements. That will let you begin the project confident that you’ll have adequate resources in place for the migration.
2. Underestimating user and business impact — Don’t underestimate the effect of migration on your co-workers’ ability to do their job. Nobody can work efficiently when resource-intensive migration tasks are bogging down the network and servers.
3. Inconsistent or missing strategy for coexistence — If you can’t pull off your entire migration at once, you’ll have to live with one foot in the old world and the other in the new one. Ask yourself how you’ll make coexistence work and for how long you’ll have to make it work.
4. Inadequate data protection — Common sense calls for backing up regularly, but you can lose sight of common sense in an overwhelming migration project. And test for recovery while you’re at it, in case you suddenly need to restore data.
5. Failure to focus on management — Scheduling, project management and progress reporting will ensure that you’re getting as much out of the new system as you thought you were going to. Continue with robust management even after you’ve finished the migration project itself.

Keep in mind the best ways to avoid those pitfalls:

• Insist on adequate time for testing.
• Arm yourself with a backup plan.
• Take advantage of the comprehensive, end-to-end support built into dedicated software tools..

Have a look at the e-book for more ideas on structuring your migration and upgrade projects. A half-hour of Jeopardy! with the kids beats a half-hour of DNS changes and node restarts any day.