PDW Implementation Expertise offers existing SQL server customer’s huge performance benefits. BI Voyage’s Performance POC can show customers the dramatic increases in query response time they can get form PDW. The next question a customer has is level of effort and risk to migrate existing DW and Data Marts from SQL Server to PDW.
BI Voyage has a utility that can help with the initial evaluation of effort and risk as well as produce artifacts to help automate the migration process. The utility is run against your existing SQL Server database and leverages the SQL system views and best practices document by Microsoft for PDW. The output includes DB an table create statements for PDW, including meta data about how many columns contain unsupported data types, meta data about how Distribution keys were chosen, and scripts to pull data out of SQL and load it in to PDW.
Initial review of these scripts and meta data can give a good initial indication of the level of effort to migrate the existing structures and data. The output from the migration utility taken in context with known query patterns and existing ETL loads allows BI Voyage to help the customer to determine a realistic level of effort and identify areas of high risk that should be addressed prior to project beginning.
An advantage to our customers is that BI Voyage can customize the utility as needed for specialized circumstances. Possibly a customer had federated their existing data mart by month across multiple servers; the utility could be customized to auto generate the necessary scripts to extract the data from multiple servers and load to a single PDW destination.
Bi Voyage has used the tool on multiple implementations and POCs and continues to refine the utility as we learn more from our real world experiences.