What's up with Partial Migrations?

Perhaps the number one question that I get from customers regarding migrations is whether the Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator supports partial migrations. Typically, the question goes something like "Can I migrate only the Latest?" or "Is it possible to only migrate a select set of folders?" I thought it would be a good idea to address this question here.

The simple answer is NO (Obviously, this is not what everyone likes to hear). Nonetheless, let me explain.

The Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator does not provide tools to selectively (or partially) migrate data. It has been designed to migrate the entire database - every folder and all Pro/ENGINEER object's revision and version, including their relationships. Because of the complex relationships Pro/ENGINEER has a tendency to create it is very difficult to ensure that all relationships can be captured within only a subset of folders, or retrieving only the latest PIV may provide incomplete information. To ensure that the partial selection criterion is valid the Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator would need to spend the time tracing dependencies, etc. to determine if the selection is valid. Such an algorithm would be time consuming to execute, impacting migration performance. Imagine that, taking longer to migrate less data. Performance is too important.