2.1  Migration project planning overview

A migration project starts with a migration assessment to understand what needs 

to be done and how long it will take. A systematic and organized analysis 

provides a detailed picture of the full project. The assessment requires good 

knowledge of the application to be migrated, and the products to be used. 

To assess the application you want to port, you should create an application 

profile that describes the application architecture, technologies used, application 

functions, application interface, application environment characteristics, 

database detail, and application size, etc.

Based on the application profile, you can then plan the software and hardware 

needed for the target system. The planning stage is also a good time to consider 

the rich DB2 functions and features of the DB2 UDB product family, which can 

increase your productivity and reduce the maintenance cost. 

You also need to understand the skills required and the available resources for 

the migration project. IBM also provides a variety of DB2 courses to help IBM 

customers learn DB2 UDB quickly.

Migration assessment provides you the overall picture of the migration tasks and 

effort needed. A migration project plan can be created based on the migration 

assessment to manage each migration steps. 

Tools can help you saving time in your migration project. Support for the typical 

migration steps is provided by various available tools. IBM offers the free 

migration tool 

IBM DB2 Migration Toolkit (MTK) 

for migrating from various 

relational database systems to DB2 UDB.

The process of database and application migration consists of the following main 

steps, which are discussed in detail later:

Porting preparation and installation

Database structure porting

Data porting

Application porting

Basic administration

Testing and tuning

User education

Experienced IBM specialists can support you in during any phase of the 

migration project. Special migration offerings are provided by IBM Worldwide.

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MySQL to DB2 UDB Conversion Guide