Rollback Paths

[AUDIO LOGO] Clay? Hey, Clay. How are you doing? Yeah, not bad. Replication as a strategy for data synchronization-- now, I know that there's different modes of doing database migrations, big bang, phased, and real-time data synchronization. OK? So I wanted to get your thoughts on a best strategy, things to consider. Well, a couple of things. First thing is-- we've talked about this many times before. What's your back out plan? What are you going to do if you get your data over to the new system and you start running your new system and the query that took five minutes on the old system takes five hours on the new system. And somebody comes to you and says, hey, this is unacceptable to me. How are we going to do our jobs and our business with that? How are we going to run our business with that? And now you have to go back. And in particular, if you've done a big bang and you've moved everybody over without a replication strategy in place, just do a copy, how are you going to go back without losing data? And how are you going to recover that data if you do lose it? OK. You're doing a migration in an accounting system, right? As long as it's not month end or period end and you're not trying to pay somebody right away or do that, if the migration takes longer than it should or performance isn't what it should be, you've got some time to fix it. Your accountants work 8:00 to 5:00, right? Now, flip that around. You're doing maintenance on Amazon's order entry system, or the thing that just happened with CrowdStrike. I mean, that wasn't a migration, but it was an upgrade. So it's kind of a migration. If that goes sideways, how many people is it going to impact? How much money is it going to cost the business? And you better know that before you start your migration, at least have some idea of that. So you know what the so what is, and if it's going to be important or if you can take your time and fix it. And you have to roll back. But even then, like I say, how are you going to roll back effectively and not lose all the data? If I'm the customer that has the order that-- you take five orders on the new system. If I'm one of those customers that had that order in there and you lose that order because you had to go back to the old system, I'm going to be pretty pissed off. OK. Yeah, maybe it's only five customers, but-- So you're saying-- --maybe it's one of your biggest customers. So you're saying real time, bi-directional, kind of blue, blue-green kind of configuration, synchronization is a better mode, safer mode for your database migration. OK? Yeah. I mean, but again, do you need that? I mean, is that what you really need, or do you need to have that level of replication and duplication of products and so on? And if you do, then yeah, better have it. But you need to first of all understand if you need it. Well, what's the risk? What's the downside? If the migration fails or if you lose that order, we lose a couple of orders, or that happens, again, it's different for an accounting system than it is for an order entry system and an online e-commerce business. How much pain can you withstand on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being big bang. That's your baseline. How more complex is that blue-green deployment? I mean, obviously it's going to be more complex, and you've got to account for all the details, and so on. But really, when you stop and think about it, you've got to make a copy anyway. At some point, you're going to make a copy and move the data from database A to database B. So you take that out of the equation and say, OK, what am I adding when I add replication or fallback capability or whatever you want to call it? Well, you're just adding the replication piece, and that shouldn't be that much more difficult. Yeah, it's going to take a one-time setup, and you need to set it up once. But the cool thing about that is you're going to set it up in a way that doesn't impact your production environment. So all it really takes is time and some resources to set it up. So if you pick the right tool, then the additional setup shouldn't be that hard. I mean, it kind of intimidates people when they think about it. But then you say, well, wait a minute, I got to make a copy anyway, so all I'm doing is adding replication on top of that copy. OK, and I can test it as much as I want to. So Yeah, OK. Well, let's do that again. If the risk of a big bang is big enough, the reward of replication is definitely going to be there.