[rt-users] Merging two instances

[Konstantin Naryzhniy]

Jesse, Alex,
I really appreciate you digging into the issue!

Yes, the transactions, groupmembers and othe subrecords' ids could vary significantly between the two instances, so this is the main issue.
Well it does sound quite discouraging that even the BestPractical team gave up the idea=)

Our business task is two transfer half of the support team from one instance to another, which the rest of the staff uses. If we cannot merge the databases, we face a transactional period, when either
a) engineers have to work in both instances,
b) all the 'In progress' tickets from the old instance get CC of the new instance and thus, once a correspondence is added to ticket, a new one is created on the second instance.

I guess, we'll stick with b.
Unless that way the mailgate doesn't get confused routing emails that have something like "[Helpdesk2 #222222] RE: [HelpDesk1 #111111] Blah-blah" in subject.

Thanks again!

Kostya

-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Vincent [mailto:jesse at bestpractical.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 7:57 PM
To: Konstantin Naryzhniy
Cc: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: Re: [rt-users] Merging two instances




On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 12:24:05PM +0300, Konstantin Naryzhniy wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I was hoping you could advise me on the RT migration issue we have encountered here at Parallels:
>
> We would like to merge one RT (old one) database in to another RT (new one) without losing any tickets or user data.
> These both RTs have about the same number of existing tickets (about 400k) and these tickets numbers are conflicting with each other.
> I've scrolled through the Wiki and the Lists, but failed to locate any data on the matter.
>
> Does anyone have experience of performing such a merge? I'd appreciate any recommendations and solution to make sure we do not lose any old RT data when moving to the new RT.
> Tricky issues that I see, apart from the id conflicts are:
> 1)      the 'old' RT is 3.6.5 while the 'new' one's 3.4. Don't ask why=)

That's actually unlikely to be a huge issue, actually.

> 2)      the conflicts in user emails can exist. Customers could be registered in both RT instances prior to merging.

Also, the fact that all of the subsidiary records are going to conflict
as well. We started on a merge tool once, but didn't get far on it since
it was just a thought experiement at the time.

-j