LEGACY DATA CONVERSION FOR THE YEAR 2000
by Doug Laney, Consulting Manager, Prism Solutions

The Year 2000 Problem

Existing business systems throughout your organization may be saddled with the problem of storing and processing six-digit dates. Eliminating the two-digit century from consideration when building these systems was a common way to save disk storage and improve system performance. With the turn of the century approaching, systems that have eclipsed their intended life-span will have to undergo costly maintenance or migration. This is not optional. Many publications prophesize that the technical inability or prohibitive cost to solve this problem will bury some large corporations. And for most companies, this problem must be completely solved well before December 31, 1999. Business systems that do long-range forecasting or planning need attention now.

More Than Just a Problem with Programs

While companies scramble to evaluate the scope of the problem within their own millions of lines of program code, few are considering the urgency and strategic importance of converting existing data. Years of on-line and archived business data soon will be rendered useless. Trend analysis, competitive analysis, historical searches and business performance reporting will become difficult, if not impossible, without first converting this data.

Data Conversion Options

Forward-thinking business managers are approaching this problem as an opportunity -- an opportunity to migrate closed legacy systems to more open client/server environments. Here too, existing data (and not just dates) must be extracted and converted. Some companies may find it preferable to maintain existing systems. Still, both current and historical data must be converted.

The DW 2000 Solution

Companies that own data warehousing tools, or those pondering the investment, may want to consider the added value and justification of using it to repair legacy data in this manner. Extract/transformation tool strengths make them ideal choices for nearly any kind of date conversion. In fact, most data warehouse projects perform date enhancement to add the century to dates being populated into their warehouses. Doing so has helped ensure their abilities to perform trend analysis across the millenia.

So make sure you are not just tackling half of your company's Year 2000 problem. Consider the power of the commercially available extract/transformation tools to make sure your legacy and archived data is dressed up for the Year 2000 party too!

For more information, see http://www.prismsolutions.com