Originally Posted by
Dave_C
Sorry, I totally disagree here as someone that works in IT.
The Exec Club system isn't that large a database. Yes there are 10's of millions of members, but the transaction rate has to be pretty low. Many, many large companies have many orders of magnitude larger database platforms with web front ends that have zero perceptible down-time during upgrades and migrations. The only reason they've taken it down for so long is that they're cheap. Probably why it's over-run too.
I totally agree. As head of IT Architecture in a household name I wouldn't dare propose a 4 day outage to my CTO for any migration. In this day and age there are many tried and tested methods of migration including the use of delta's in order to provide near zero downtime.