As organizations evaluate the benefits of moving legacy or non-standard databases to enterprise-grade platforms, one recurring challenge persists: how to quantify whether a migration is truly worth the effort. Subjective opinions and technical assumptions often cloud decision-making, leaving businesses uncertain about risk, cost, and value.
To address this challenge, I developed the Migration Viability Score (MVS) — a structured and data-informed framework designed to evaluate the feasibility and impact of database migrations before committing significant time or capital.
What Is the Migration Viability Score?
The Migration Viability Score is a weighted, multi-factor model that evaluates whether a database workload should be migrated, retained, or redesigned based on business, personnel, and technical criteria.
The score combines three key categories:
- Cost Drivers – Does the target platform offer long-term cost advantages (e.g., license savings, operational efficiency)?
- Personnel Drivers – Can your organization consolidate skills or reduce redundant database support overhead?
- Technical Drivers – Will the new platform meet or exceed the functionality of the current system?
The scoring model computes a net benefit score and provides a simple, actionable recommendation:
- Positive Score → Migrate
- Negative Score → Retain (or re-evaluate)
Why Use It?
The MVS offers several benefits:
- Objective Scoring: Replaces gut-feel with a structured decision-making framework.
- Cross-Functional Value: Helps align stakeholders across finance, operations, and IT.
- Repeatability: Can be reused across workloads for consistent evaluation.
I’ve found this particularly useful when evaluating migrations from community or open-source platforms to commercial platforms.
Built for Real-World Decision Making
Migration decisions are rarely one-dimensional. That’s why the MVS model incorporates normalization techniques to account for the relative importance of each driver. This ensures your most critical concerns carry the appropriate weight, whether they’re financial, staffing, or technical.
I’ve made this model available via a downloadable spreadsheet and supporting documentation to help teams benchmark and customize it for their own environments.
Get Started
You can explore the scoring logic, weight adjustments, and even apply it to your own workloads by downloading my Migration Viability Score toolkit.
In future posts, I’ll share examples of how the MVS can be used to make confident, defensible migration decisions and avoided costly missteps.
OraMatt: YABAOracle 
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