There are many tools to visualize or analyze databases. You will also find lots of programs to copy databases between different systems. However, we found that these tools are not flexible enough and do not fulfill all our needs. They fail because, e.g., they cannot map the various data types between databases correctly, or because the amount of data becomes too big.

The solution we suggest is to program data migrations using an extensible framework instead of configuring some (limited) tool. We found that this approach gives us much more flexibility when performing data migrations. Migrating a database almost always requires a custom solution, since every system has its peculiarities.

Another problem we address is the fact that databases are often accessible from within some internal corporate network only. As developers we would like to work independently with a local database clone on our computer. And we don't want to install Oracle or DB2 for that, but use Open Source products such as Postgresql or MySQL.