[aidos]

I went through a similar process a few years ago (4k dbs into a single db, all mysql). You'll get something working fairly quickly and then spend days debugging data anomalies that have crept in over the years.

We ended up with a frankenstein mixture of bash scripts, a sequence of sql transformations, some python and some php to decode some of the data that had been stored in pickled / php encoded packages.

It's not something I want to repeat any time soon :-)

[fermuch]

It truly sounds like a nightmare. How much time did it took to move everything to psql, and how long until it was stable enough to not keep an eye on it?

[aidos]

To clarify, it all stayed on mysql — just pulled everything into a single db.

I can't remember exactly but the whole project was done in a real hurry, about 4 weeks I think. It included a rewrite of the application / website (about 20k lines of backend code, html and js / css), migration of all the data, creation of new transcoders, migration of a lot of data asset/video data from another server.

No idea how we got through it all in retrospect, but I had to. A few days after we finished I got married and went off on my honeymoon, so I guess I decided it was stable enough the day I released it...! :-)