New Database, Who Dis?

Next week, my company is launching a new database to maintain our many records: anyone who has taken one of our exams, certificants (people who have completed sets of exams that entitle them to a certificate), schools, companies, and so on. Our old system, which I found out today is 20 years old, goes down Wednesday evening, and then we'll begin transferring over 4 million records into the new system. (We've done some test runs of transferring data and extensive mapping for many months now. And I've been scoring and QCing exams in a Dev environment for almost that long.)

It's been a long, busy process to get to this point, working with multiple vendors, and I've been spending the last several months preparing us to score our exams in the new system. This project has been good practice for, among other things, understanding how we convert Rasch scores to our standard scaling, how we create item strings for scoring computer adaptive exams, and keeping my SQL skills fresh. And since I'm currently a one-person department, as a coworker is out on maternity leave and another left to take another job, I'm completing job tasks for 2.5 to 3 people every day, on top of database stuff.

Blogging will likely be on hold this week and I may not have a Statistics Sunday post, since I'll be working all-day Saturday and most/all of Sunday. But I'll see if I can squeeze some time in for something.