Space Django: Migrating and Redesigning a Database while Hunting for Satellites.

Being a fast-paced startup and developing a completely new product in the Space Industry is very challenging, and moving fast wasn’t just a requirement but essential. It's the kind of environment that is hard to think too much ahead, and for that reason, our database was created to address the problems we had at hand. After a while, new products and features were required, and our database couldn't handle all of them. That’s when we decided to move our data to a newly designed database instance with proper relationships, able to handle more features, higher workloads and scalable. During the planning phase, several approaches were discussed, such as creating a script to copy the data and some off-the-shelf software that we thought could handle that for us. However, the complexity of implementing those approaches wasn’t feasible with our deadlines for releasing the new product. So, we decided to copy the data using Django ORM (our product was already using Django), the idea was to avoid the complexity of creating complex SQL Queries to copy data to new tables while keeping the data consistency and integrity. In this presentation, we aim to demonstrate how our database was limiting the company’s scalability and how we fixed those problems by migrating to a new database schema whilst maintaining two database instances, one for internal operations and the other for customer-facing functions. Moreover, we show how we did that using object-oriented programming in combination with Django’s ORM to migrate our database without the need to handle complex SQL commands to copy data, keep relationships, and create new ones.