Ercenk's WebLog

First day in LA before PDC

7:30 flight from SEA-TAC, at least a short one to LA.

I was a late registrant to the event, thus could not find a place in one of the conference hotels. I was quite hopeless to find a place to stay at, and then I found this hotel. It is in a neighborhood not quite like downtown hotels are in but, hey it is real close to that marvelous Mexican food place.

I will be proctoring for the Hands-On-Labs and hoping to see lots of people I know from the industry and meet with lots of attendees as well for tomorrow afternoon. It is going to be yet another great event, with lots of exciting technologies, great people, and great discussions.

Look for the people in t-shirts with bright colors in the coming days of the conference!

Back on msdn blogs after the first couple of posts

I was about to move to a different team within Microsoft when I had started my technical blog on MSDN. Then, I moved on and started to work on a new technology Microsoft is about to announce in a couple of days during PDC 2005. I needed to keep silent about the technology I am working on after I had changed buildings. Nice new office, nice people, and awesome technology... Wait is about to be over quite soon...

Reminder for me: life is not all about computers and software solutions…

Having posted my question to the world, “What is migration?”; it dawned on me that this is rather a generic question. It results in all sorts of different answers if a search is done on the web:

(http://toolbar.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=TOOLBR&q=%22what+is+migration%3F%22)

 

I often do this mistake and think that everybody else in the world is in this industry. My default assumption is that; such a question will mean “what is migration of a software solution from a particular platform to another?” or a general one “what is migration of a software solution from one version to another?”

 

But I am also relieved that I am not the only one who has these assumptions. I remember my MD friends trying to explain a concept about a particular disease in very technical terms, or my civil engineer friends referring to the parts of a building’s architecture in words I have never heard about.

 

But, what is the use of referring to the queuing theory and saying “a single queue with multiple servers pertains to the fastest processing of the items” on a flight check-in line? And then by looking at the quizzical look on the face of the person on the receiving end of this statement, I ask to myself “am I really a geek?”. My answer is definitely a “yes” after that since I start to think that it was an HTTP 500 response J

What is migration?

This question is the most prominent, yet unanswered one ever since I started conducting migration projects: "What is migration?"

Merriam-Webster Online defines the word as (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=migration)

Etymology: Latin migratus, past participle of migrare; perhaps akin to Greek ameibein to change
1 : to move from one country, place, or locality to another
2 : to pass usually periodically from one region or climate to another for feeding or breeding
3 : to change position in an organism or substance <filarial worms migrate within the human body>

So, if a solution runs on in one environment and the need is to migrate it to another environment, what are the changes? Is it only the environment (can be read as the platform), or the behavior of the solution for better adapting the new environment change?

To be more specific, should I expect an application using one particular RDBMS to behave the same once I change the RDBS it is using? Or should I make changes on the application for helping it to adapt to its new environment?