Case Study · Higher education & life sciences
Consolidating Legacy Databases for an Academic Medical Program
A one-year project unifying several legacy databases into a newly designed SQL Server database, with a full field-by-field mapping, a validated data migration and a new application for managing students, faculty, advisors and conferences.
- Client
- A biomedical career program at a leading academic medical institution
- Industry
- Higher education & life sciences
- Our role
- Engineering partner
- Duration
- 1 year
The challenge
A biomedical career-development program at a leading academic medical institution managed its operations across several legacy databases. Information about students, professors, advisors and conferences was spread across separate systems with inconsistent formats, making it hard to get a complete, reliable view of the program.
The program needed one well-designed database and an application its staff could use day to day, without losing any historical data.
What we did
SunAge led the project from requirements through delivery:
- Gathered requirements with program stakeholders to understand how students, faculty, advisors and conferences relate, and what staff needed to track.
- Designed a new SQL Server data model that brought every legacy source together in one consistent schema.
- Produced a comprehensive mapping document, aligning each legacy column and format with the correct data type in the new schema, so every transformation was explicit and reviewable.
- Executed the data migration, transferring multiple legacy sources into the new database with validation at each step.
- Built a new front-end application on top of the database, giving staff a single place to manage program records.
The outcome
- One authoritative database in place of several disconnected legacy systems.
- Clean, consistently typed data, with every migration decision documented.
- A purpose-built application that made managing the program simpler for staff.
