FAQ

Every project brings its share of questions. Our Frequently Asked Questions page is here to make finding answers quick and easy. Whether you’re curious about our migration process, technologies, or the way we work with clients, this section gathers the information you need in one place. If your question isn’t listed here, we’re always just a message away and ready to help.

Business

The time and cost for a migration project depend on several factors, including the size of your application, the number of programs and database tables, the level of complexity, and any custom features or integrations. Most projects range from a few months for smaller systems to 12–18 months for large, enterprise-level applications. Costs vary accordingly, but our Pre-Assessment process can help us get a rough estimate. of the time and cost your project will take 

Our Pre-Assessment phase gives clients an initial idea of project scope and effort. By providing us with the total number of programs, total lines of code, and total database tables in your system, we can prepare a low-to-high rough order-of-magnitude estimate for the migration. This helps you understand potential timelines and costs before committing to the next phase. Feel free to reach out to us at info@coremigration.com  or our Contact Us to learn more  

This Detailed Assessment phase is the part of the project where we receive your source code and analyze it to provide an exact time and cost estimate. During this phase of the project, we use our established software and team of skilled modernization experts to collect and analyze every line of source code that makes up business application(s) to be assessed including dictionaries, databases, data entry / inquiry screens, menu screens, reports, batch processes, scheduled jobs, external programs, third party components batch  command files. 

 The end result of this is a Detailed Assessment and a Statement Of Work and accompanying PowerPoint presentation that details our findings including the results of our analysis, the time and costs to modernize the business application to Java or .NET environment accessing the migrated data store. 

Feel free to reach out to us at info@coremigration.com  or our Contact Us to learn more. 

The CORE  team handles the entire migration process, from design receovery, forward engineering, unit testing and functional testing based on test cases provided by the client. This ensures  a smooth and efficient transition. We manage everything, with ongoing collaboration to keep you informed. Learn More.

For those clients who have the team and want to take the lead, we provide support through planning and training to help your team manage the migration process. We generate the raw code from the CORE engine and your take it through to Unit, Functional, System and Impolementation with support from the CORE team. Learn More.

A code drop at Core refers to the process of dividing a business application into functional areas, such as customer, order, inventory, or finance, and migrating these sections one at a time. This approach allows us to deliver the new system incrementally, enabling early testing, faster feedback, and smoother adoption while ensuring each area is fully functional before moving to the next.

Business Rules Extraction

Business rules are the embodiment of your organization’s policies, practices, and operational guidelines, developed and refined over time. These rules ensure your business runs smoothly and consistently 

Our Business Rules Extraction service uses the same advanced Design Recovery tools we apply in legacy migration projects, but instead of generating new application code, we produce clear documentation, spreadsheets, and UML diagrams. This gives you a detailed, organized view of the business rules embedded in your application, helping you understand how the system works today and providing a solid foundation for modernization, redevelopment, or process improvement initiatives. Read More 

A business rule is a statement that defines or constrains how a business operates. It can describe a policy, calculation, process step, or decision that must be followed to ensure consistency and compliance. Business rules can be as simple as “a customer must have a valid email address before placing an order” or as complex as “interest is calculated daily but only applied to the account at month-end.”

 

In legacy systems, business rules are often buried deep within application code, making them hard to identify or update. Extracting these rules is a key step in modernization, as it allows them to be documented, validated, and applied accurately in the new system.

Data Conversion

We specialize in converting legacy data into clean, structured formats ready for modern platforms like Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. Whether your data is locked in an outdated format or spread across fragmented sources, we have the tools and experience to bring it into a coherent, modern structure, safely and accurately. Learn More.
 

We can extract information from virtually any source. This includes IMAGE databases, RDB databases, Interbase, indexed file systems, C-ISAM, ISAM, flat files, sequential files, PowerHouse subfiles, Excel spreadsheets, and a wide range of relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. Over the years, we’ve handled data in countless formats — from well-documented modern systems to decades-old proprietary structures.

If it stores data, chances are we’ve already migrated it. Our process ensures that your data is extracted accurately, validated for consistency, and made ready for use in your new environment.

Core supports migrating legacy data from a wide range of platforms, including IMAGE, indexed file systems, flat files, sequential, relative, direct, excel, CSV, Powerhouse subfiles and other non-relational data stores. When a data migration is needed of Legacy data, we can move your data to modern relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, or PostgreSQL as part of your legacy modernization project. 
 

Legacy Migration

The Design Preservation Toolkit contains all the tools that directly interact with the legacy source code. These tools perform several individual tasks that enable it to read each legacy source file, perform appropriate syntax checking, decompose the source modules into smaller fragments known as “tokens”, and prepare these tokens to be accepted by the API Loader. These tools are built on tried and tested programming language grammar files, as well as high-speed C# CORE librairies and functions designed to perform the critical task of decomposing the legacy source code into the CORE Repository.

The CORE Forward Engineering (FE) toolkit is an integrated application development environment that uses the information in the CORE repository to perform an assortment of tasks, including re- documentation, application and data definition navigation, impact analysis as well as forward engineering to various target environments including Java and Microsoft .NET. The target application development environments and technologies currently generated by the tool include Java and Microsoft .NET. The target database environments include Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL (from Image, RMS, C-ISAM, Rdb, etc). Read More.

The CORE Repository is an object-oriented relational database and library of Application Programming Interfaces (API) that validate incoming data and ensure the recovered application is consistently represented and stored in the form of objects, methods and business rules that make up the underlying application. Read More.

Application Development

Built on years of experience, our Java solutions plays a central role in both our legacy modernization efforts and our custom application development. We’ve delivered successful Java-based solutions that span a wide range of business needs—from online data inquiry and transaction capture to high-performance ETL, complex reporting, and robust batch processing. Read More.

 

Microsoft .NET development plays a central role in both our legacy modernization efforts and greenfield application builds. Whether we’re reimagining 30-year-old systems or building fresh solutions from the ground up, .NET technologies give us the flexibility and performance to deliver stable, scalable software across a wide range of industries. Read More.

Database Layer

The DAO (Data Access Object) layer is a key part of our modernization approach. Each table in your application is assigned its own class and DAO interface, which all programs use for data access. This centralizes all Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations in one place, making it easier and faster to add, remove, or modify columns without having to update every program individually. Read More.

The first migration project undertaken by Core was to migrate an Interbase database hosted on a VAX/VMS to Oracle. Core has migrated to Legacy Data structures to Oracle for many of our clients. Oracle is used in a wide variety of applications, mostly in settings where data matters—and where losing data or experiencing downtime could be a major issue. Read More. 

SQL Server is used pretty much anywhere a business needs to store structured data and access it reliably. Because SQL Server is so flexible, it is used across industries—finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, education, you name it. Read More.

DB2 is a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by IBM. It’s been around for decades—first released in the early 1980s and it’s used by organizations that need to store, manage, and retrieve large volumes of structured data reliably and efficiently. In simpler terms, DB2 helps businesses organize their data, customer records, sales transactions, financial logs, product inventory and make sure that data is available, secure, and consistent at all times. Read More. 

The process of organizing and structuring data into a format that is simple to comprehend, modify, and track down is known as data modeling. It precisely determines the relatedness of various chunks of information with each other and presents a map of how information must be stored and retrieved without wastage. Data modeling in tools such as Power BI, in Excel, or data bases assists you in establishing table relationships, in creating measures and calculations, and in crafting a model that will aid reporting, analysis, and decision-making. Read More.

Front End Development and Tools Used at CORE

The main idea behind React is component-based development. Rather than writing an entire web page as one large block of code, developers build small, reusable components (such as buttons, forms, or menus) that can be assembled into complete user interfaces. This modular approach improves development speed, code organization, and maintenance. Read More.

Angular is a front-end web development framework built using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript. It was created and is maintained by Google and was first released in 2016 as a complete rewrite of the earlier AngularJS framework. Angular is often used for developing large-scale, complex applications because of its structure, scalability, and built-in features. Read More.

Bootstrap is a front-end framework that helps developers and designers build websites and web applications quickly and consistently. It was originally created by developers at Twitter back in 2011, and it is now one of the most widely used tools for web design in the world. Read More.

WPF, (Windows Presentation Foundation) is a user interface framework by Microsoft to create applications based on Windows desktop. It is the constituent of the “.NET” and enables a developer to construct a user interface that is rich, interactive and modern and a combination of XAML (to give layout and design) and C# similar to provide backend logic. Read More. 

Business Logic Development and Tools used at CORE

Dapper is a light and high performance micro-ORM (Object Relation Mapper) in the .NET technology. Created by the folks at Stack Overflow it sought to provide an easy to use, lightweight access to data in .NET projects without the overhead of a fully featured ORM such as Entity Framework. Read More.

MyBatis is a lightweight open-source Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) Java component that enables the developer to work less easily with relational databases in a more flexible manner. MyBatis itself is simply a Java-to-SQL mapping tool and is ideally suited to any applications that need to manage data persistence without the complexity or overhead of a heavyweight ORM engine like Hibernate. Read More.

In a legacy migration project, the business logic from your application is moved to a dedicated layer between the user interface (UI) and the DAO/database layer. This separation ensures cleaner design, easier maintenance, and better scalability. In our solution, business logic is implemented in C# for .NET projects, or in Java using frameworks such as Spring Boot or Spring Batch for Java projects. This approach preserves your application’s functionality while making it easier to enhance and maintain in the future. 

Spring Batch is a Java-based framework designed to help developers build and run batch processing jobs especially when those jobs need to handle large volumes of data in a reliable and repeatable way. Spring Batch part of the larger Spring ecosystem which means it fits nicely alongside other Spring tools like Spring Boot, Spring Data, and Spring Security. Read More.

Spring Boot is a Java-based framework used to build web applications, APIs, and microservices—quickly and with minimal setup. Spring Boot built on top of the Spring Framework, which has been around for years and is known for being powerful, but sometimes complicated. Spring Boot came along to solve a simple problem: make Spring easier to use. Read More.

Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO) is an identity and access management solution that enables easier and more practical application logins by the user. It enables the users to provide a single sign-in, and then access numerous services without having to re-authenticate themselves. Read More.

Chances are that if you have wandered even a little in the world of programming, you have heard of C# (read C-sharp). As the product of Microsoft in the beginning of the 2000s, C# was created to be modern, easy-to-use, and potent. It is the Microsoft response to Java, bringing together the form and performance of the ancient programming languages such as C++ and clarity and sheer simplicity required of the current software production. Read More. 

Quality Assurance

At Core, Quality Assurance (QA) isn’t an afterthought, it’s part of how we build. Over the years, we have handled some of the most complex application migrations in North America, and along the way, our approach to QA has evolved into something we are proud to offer on its own. The same deep, hands-on testing methodologies that safeguards our modernization projects powers  standalone service to companies that need expert oversight and reliable outcomes. Read More.

End-to-End (E2E) testing is a way of software testing which tests that an entire app flow operates correctly in a beginning-to-end manner. It replicates actual user actions to ensure that each component of the system interacts in a right manner. This should take into account the frontend, the backend, and databases, APIs and any third-party facilities and services. Read More.

Test script development entails development of detailed instructions that will give a testing software or a tester clear guidelines on how to verify the operation of a section of an application works properly. These scripts determine the inputs, the anticipated results and the process required to execute the test. Read More.

A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of something to see which one works better. For example, you might test two different headlines on a webpage to see which one gets more clicks or leads. You show Version A (the current one) to half of your audience and Version B (the new version) to the other half. Then, you measure which one performs better based on your goal  like sign-ups, sales, or time spent on the page. Read More.

Microsoft DevOps is a combination of two elements; namely Development and Operations. It is not a particular tool or language but an approach therefore and a culture structured to have software development and IT operation teams converge. DevOps is aimed at faster and more reliable construction, testing, releasing, and improving of software. Read More.

Playwright is a modern tool that helps developers and testers automate web browsers. Playwright was created by Microsoft and released in 2020 and while that is relatively recent, it has quickly become a favorite among teams working on websites and web applications. Read More.

JUnit is a Java unit testing framework which supports developers to write and execute the unit tests. A unit test is a small program that determines whether a given part of program is functioning as intended. JUnit is used to write these tests, make them organized and automatically verify the outcomes during development. Read More.

NUnit is a unit test framework that supports the .NET applications. It enables programmers to create and execute tests to check that their code is executing properly. NUnit is one of the most popular testing frameworks within the .NET community and it is instrumental in ensuring that code quality is high, and bugs are found early, and allows test-driven development. Read More. 

Git is a distributed revision control system that was designed to trace amendments to source code as well as coordinate collective work. It enables programmers to store versions of their code, test without pain and align with colleagues easily.  Developed by Linus Torvalds in 2005, Git has come to be the industry de facto version control system in software development. It is popular with sites such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, and it allows working both individually and in groups.  Read More.

Continuous Integration pipeline (CI pipeline) is simply a set of tasks that is automated to run every time someone commits a new piece of code to a shared repo. To ascertain the integration of the code into the current project, the pipeline checks, builds, tests and validates the code automatically.  Continuous Delivery pipeline (CD) , is a sequence of programmed processes, which carry software in an accomplishment and environment-checked produce build to a staging or production environment. It is the successor of Continuous Integration (CI) and it prioritizes issuing new features or updates as quickly, reliably and safely as possible. Read More. 

Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service, built on SQL Server, in the cloud. It allows the usage of scalable, secure and high performance database capabilities with no requirement to manage physical equipment or manage software installation. You can treat it as one of the usual SQL Server databases, but without any less of the cloud advantages. Read More.

Docker is a platform through which software applications are built, packaged and executed in containers. A container is a lightweight standalone package that contains all necessities to execute a segment of software, namely the code, the runtime, the libraries and system tools, to ensure that software functions in any environment in the same manner. Read More.

Project Management

Agile is an adaptive and user cooperative software development approach. It aims at providing customer value by releasing value in very small increments at frequent frequencies instead of infrequent large releases. Agile is iteration, feedback and continuous improvement. Read More.

Scrum enables the teams to divide large work into small manageable chunks and report progress on a regular basis. It focuses on openness, auditing and transformation. Read More.

The Waterfall methodology is an old-fashioned linear software development system. A project, in this model, is divided into different phases that once they are accomplished, we follow the next phase in a definite order. One stage has to be completed completely before another stage commences. Read More.

SDLC, or System Development Life Cycle, is a structured process for delivering high-quality software through defined stages such as analysis, design, build, testing, and deployment. At Core, we use a hybrid SDLC approach for legacy migration projects, applying its proven structure while hyper-accelerating the analysis, design, and build phases using our automation tools. This allows us to preserve the rigor and quality of SDLC while dramatically reducing the time it takes to migrate and modernize your application. Read More.

Miscellaneous

Active Directory ( AD ) is the directory service designed by the Microsoft Corporation predominantly used in the windows domain networks. Organizations use it to securely manage their users, computers, permissions and other resources in an organizational, centralized means. Active Directory contains the data regarding objects within the network and simplifies the administration of access, application of policies and controls authentication and authorization between systems and across systems. Read More 

C is a programming language and not just any language. It’s one of the oldest, most respected, and most widely used languages in the history of computing. C is known for being fast, efficient, and close to the hardware. It gives you low-level control over how your computer works, without being as complex or hard to read as pure assembly language. Read More.

C++ is used in areas where speed, efficiency, and close-to-the-metal control are important. You won’t often see it used for things like basic websites or mobile apps but for high-performance applications, it’s often the top choice. C++ gives developers a lot of tools and how you use it often depends on what you’re building. It supports multiple styles of programming: procedural (like C), object-oriented (like Java), and even generic or functional styles. Read More.

COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language. It is one of the oldest programming languages still in use today, developed in the late 1950s through a collaborative effort between the U.S. government and private industry. The primary goal of COBOL was to create a language that could be easily read and understood by non-technical business professionals, particularly those involved in accounting, payroll, and administrative work. Read More.

A batch system is any setup where data or tasks are processed in groups (“batches”) rather than individually or in real time. Instead of acting on each input as it arrives, these systems collect inputs over a period of time and process them all at once.

Batch systems have been around for decades. They might not be flashy or real-time, but they’re essential. Whether it’s payroll processing, invoice generation, large-scale data updates, or nightly reporting jobs, these systems often handle huge volumes of work — silently and behind the scenes. Read More.

DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula language that is utilized in Power BI, Excel Power Pivot and Analysis Services Tabular Models. It enables you to build your own calculations, filters and metrics which cannot be done using simple drag-and-drop abilities. DAX has a similar syntax to the Excel formulas but it knows how to work with data models. It enables you to design the measures, calculated columns and tables, and the calculated tables to examine data in ways that are interactive, reusable, and react using filters and slices in your reports. Read More.

Jasper Reports is a reporting library that can be used to generate pixel-perfect ad hoc, custom reports based on data of relational databases, XML, and many more. It comes as an integrated option in Java programs or integrated with Java reporting servers to create documents such as PDFs, excel sheets, same HTML page or printable forms. Read More.

Microsoft Power BI is an analytics business tool that assists users in transforming raw data into an informative actionable insight on interacting and visualizing dashboards and reports. It enables individuals and businesses to explore the information, identify patterns, and make data-based choices in a very visual and ease to understand format. Read More.

Power Query is a data transformation and preparation application included in Microsoft Power BI, Excel and other Microsoft applications. Through it, users can access multiple sources of data and clean and model it as well as load the data into a data model or spreadsheet, without executing conventional code. Power query aims at simplifying the process of working with disorganized, unstructured, or inconsistent data. It includes a graphical user interface, which allows the user to construct transformation step by step and every action is tracked as a part of a replicable process. Read More.

PowerHouse is a fourth-generation programming language—or 4GL—that was created by Cognos in the early 1980s. Back then, building business applications from scratch was time-consuming, expensive, and required highly skilled developers. PowerHouse was introduced to change that. It was built with one main goal in mind: to make building database applications faster and easier. This mattered a lot to large companies running on mainframes and minicomputers like HP3000 or DEC VAX. Read More.

The short answers is Yes. Many of the projects we have migrated for clients have been migrated to Liuus and/or Unix variants. Linux / Unix is a multitasking multi-search operating system, incepted in the 1970s at Bell Labs. It had to be mobile, safe, and effective and that is why it became one of the most influential operating systems in the history of computing. Linux, macOS, BSD family, etc. are direct descents of Unix or inspired by it. Unix offers a command-line, species of file system and permission based security model which formed the basis of the modern operating systems. Read More.

Unix shell scripts typically get migrated to either PowerShell if the target operating systerm is WIndows based, or upgraded to include the new calls to the new programs (migrated Java programs). In some cases, we sometimes will migrate these Unix shell scripts to Java code if it makes sense in the overall migration project. 

Unix shell scripting is a way to tell your computer what to do using a simple text file. These scripts are a series of commands written for the Unix shell  which is the command-line interface you use to interact with a Unix-based system. The shell is like a translator between you and the computer’s operating system. Read More.

Virtual machine (VM) is a software simulation. It uses an operating system and applications in the same way a real computer does only that it runs in another system; this is referred to as host. The hypervisor is utilized to structure and run VMs and allocate hardware sources including CPU, memory and store as per the host machine to the VMs.  Read More.

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