I have a custom-made site which I want to migrate to a commercial solution which appears more robust. For the sake of an example, let’s say the site is currently running a forum script made from A-Z by a student and the objective is to transfer it to, say, vBulletin. What approach would be generally advised for migrating from one db structure to another? What should I look out for when analyzing differences between tables (users for example) and how could I go about automating the transformation of data from one db to another?
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Depends on how your “student” structured the DB, as well as how you’d generate any metadata that vbulletin requires. A forum is not just users and posts. There’s usually a ton of other data alongside that will simply not be present and/or in radically different formats that a simple “rename this field” or “change that table” type transformation cannot handle.
When moving between two database-drive apps, there’s likely to be a significant amount of data massageing required, and if the source (or destination) is poorly structure, it may not be possible to do it script-wise and only a manual process will work.