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by tsthename 1753 days ago
My first instinct is to develop a Hotswap unified schema, something like (https://cloudinformationmodel.org/cim-model/) and then develop bidirectional mappings to particular services. Then transformation is a repeatable {Saas pool} -> Unified model -> {Saas pool} transformation. My second instinct is to reconsider the over engineered mess my first instinct came up with. Good job on getting to the point and having things work. Looks like a cool offering, good luck with it!
2 comments

Thank you for the encouragement! We think a lot about this problem as well. We think that within a specific vertical ("productivity tools", "finance software") there is probably a lot of opportunity to use an intermediate schema for a bidirectional mapping.

But, as you mention, we're also being careful to observe what kinds of integrations customers are asking for before trying to generalize the problem.

Just thinking about the problem some more (from the perspective of the data owner), I wonder if instead of solving the problem at migration time the problem could be solved at the time of data creation.

What if data was routed to a) the Saas tool and b) to long term storage. So the act of migration becomes an act of moving raw historical data to the new tool instead of pull from service, transform and push to new service.

Oh, I think I just described a data lake..

Made me think of https://schema.org/
Never used either while modelling professionally but I think CIM's focus is slightly more on interoperability while Schema.org's goal was on sharing semantics and metadata. Those goals have a lot of overlap and the projects also have common contributors. Not sure why both exist.