Executing (Running) your Migration

General Recommendations for Project Execution

You have built all your mappings, and you are itching to try them out. But before you do, consider the following recommendations:

• It is always advised to test any migration project using a non-production target instance first. 
• Don't forget to set key mappings for all form mappings (ServiceNow instance migration excluded). If you don't you will end up creating duplicates each time you migrate.
• Consider carefully if you want your migration to update any records it finds already exist. Particularly if these are system records, you may want to prevent updates to reduce the risk of damaging existing data.
• It is advised to test with a small number of records first (use the source filtering to restrict them) If things go wrong, it will be easier to delete the small number migrated and start again. It will also take less time to complete the migration, making an iterative development methodology more effective.
• Once you have run the small migration, check the target record(s) to see if they are populated as you expect. Only run with a larger set of records once you are happy the migration does what you expect.

 

How Precision Bridge Loads and Executes Projects

To Execute a Precision Bridge Project, you Load and Schedule it for Execution. This terminology can be confusing if all you want to do is to run it straight away. Why is there not an 'Execute Now' option?

Precision Bridge maintains a list of all 'Loaded' Executions. The 'Loading' or Initialisation part of project execution will validate the project and for some adaptors, may perform other initialisation operations. For example, for a Service Now target execution, the import set tables and transform maps that will be used to receive the migrated records are created during this initialisation. Once this process is complete, the project will be added to the loaded Execution list, awaiting its turn to execute.

Precision Bridge can have multiple Project Executions loaded ready to be executed. In the 'Loaded' state the project will not execute until the user explicitly schedules it. Multiple projects can be 'scheduled' at the same time.

Every minute, or whenever another project execution completes, Precision Bridge will check through the list of executions and decide which (if any) meets its scheduling requirements to commence execution. Only ONE execution can be running at any one time, others will be queued until it completes.

Executing a Project 'Right Now'

If you have your project open in Design View, you can use Project ->Execute Open Project to execute your project. If the Project is not loaded, you can either open it in design view first, or on the Execution view select File -> Load (or Load Recent) You will be shown the usual open project dialog.

You will then be presented with the Execution Options dialog. There are a lot of options on here, but most of these can be left to the defaults. If you have executed the project before, the options will retain the settings from that last execution.

One thing you will need to do, if you have used Project Variables is to give each of these variables a value.

If you want to run the project right now, the Execution Type on the scheduling tab should be set to 'As soon As Possible' If there is no other project currently executing, or scheduled to be executed your project will be loaded and then will execute straight away. You will be shown a summary of the execution options an asked to confirm that you want to execute with these options.

The load/initialisation of the project will now be performed (on the Execution Loading Process tab)

Once that has completed, the Execution will commence, assuming that no other executions are already running. The progress bars and comments against each form mapping will give some idea of what actions are being performed and how far through the form mapping is.

At any time, you can look at the Loaded Executions list to see what executions are currently loaded, and what status they are in

From the loaded executions List, you can re-execute an execution by selecting it in the list and clicking 'Reschedule Execution'. If you do this, note that any changes made to the project since it was loaded will NOT be applied. If you make changes (in the design view) you will need to load the project for execution again.

Unloading a Completed Execution

Executions are not automatically unloaded once completed. It is recommended to Unload those that you do not intend to re-execute to save memory resources.

Performance Considerations

Precision Bridge is capable of multi-threading many operations to make full use of network and server resources to increase throughput and reduce total execution times. These are configured on the Performance Tuning tab of the execution options. When you get to the point of migrating large numbers of records, further advice on optimising performance can be found here: Recommendations for Performance Tuning