The client

A global eCommerce brand had recently undertaken a merger and acquisition of another brand. Their mission was to understand an approach to migrate and integrate with the two platforms.

The company came to Unipro because we have strong expertise in both low-code and traditional coding meaning that we could understand where there were scalability and security requirements. We worked closely with the client to carefully understand their business needs.

The challenge

When two companies merge there’s the inevitable question of how to integrate the back-end systems. Is it better to use the systems from company A or company B? What integrations need to be considered? The client was in an unusual situation as both companies have a very bespoke platform. This is where Unipro came in.

One of the primary challenges of this project was data migration. Data migration between two different systems can be complex, especially when data is heavily encrypted. There's a large volume of data, coming from multiple sources, with no off-the-shelf migration path.

The migration needed to be tested, repeated, and as fast as possible to minimise downtime.

The solution

To create a migration strategy that is automated, repeatable, and reliable as well as including present and historical data, files and configurations that can be used over and over again. The Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) method allows organisations to migrate data from multiple sources into one system.

The solution used a combination of

A lightweight C# application for data transformations
"Change data capture" tables to provide a data pipeline and minimise data transfer
Staging databases with MSSQL and MySQL stored procedures for reliable data access and updates
MySQL replication for fast and secure data transfer

Thanks to our team of experts, one of our senior developers experienced in data migration took the lead on this project, understanding the challenges when they arose and responding quickly with solutions that worked the first time.

Solution benefits

The Unipro team worked with the client throughout the duration of the project to ensure that all the relevant data was accurately migrated with minimum disruption. This enabled the client’s team to focus on key tasks such as rebuilding the acquired eCommerce website.
The solution supported multiple pipelines allowing the end-to-end migration to be tested in an isolated environment.
The C# application code allowed for complex data transformations to be implemented efficiently and executed with high performance.
The change data capture allowed pre-loading of gigabytes of customer data, while the live synchronisation was completed in just 6 minutes.
Use of MySQL replication provided a secure and efficient way to transfer the data, without the cost of an off-the-shelf cloud migration platform.