Engineer explains real differences between data migration, conversion, and ETL with project examples

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A software engineer has outlined the practical distinctions between three commonly conflated data concepts: migration (a one-time system move), conversion (reshaping data during a migration), and ETL (a continuous pipeline between live systems). Drawing on real professional projects, the author describes a Sybase-to-Oracle consolidation where CSV exports, loose VARCHAR2 dump tables, and PL/SQL scripts were used instead of heavyweight tools like Talend or MuleSoft. The dump-table approach was chosen deliberately so that bad source rows would surface during transformation rather than crashing the load boundary. A third project involved building a MuleSoft-to-Salesforce integration as a portfolio piece, illustrating a genuine ETL use case where both systems remain active. The author's central takeaway is that teams over-engineer migrations by applying ETL tooling permanently when a single-run script would suffice.

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