Conceptualization and Realization of a Database Migration Path for an International and mHealth Tinnitus Database

The mobile crowdsensing platform TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) was created to monitor and visualize fluctuations of tinnitus perception by affected individuals using smart devices. The platform aims to gather data of tinnitus patients for research purposes and to help those affected to better understand the fluctuations of tinnitus perception. Users have to answer specific questionnaires to assess tinnitus perception and tinnitus-related parameters during their daily routine. The gathered data from the questionnaires are stored in the MariaDB database running on the back-end of the application. In the future, the data of TrackYourTinnitus will be merged with clinical databases to broaden the researches related to the tinnitus symptom. Consequently, the amount of data stored in the relational database will notably increase. Additionally, MRI scans will be joined to patients? data to allow a better overview of the tinnitus development for individuals. For this purpose, it is considered to look for an alternative system for hosting the TYT database, since the current database running on MariaDB does not deliver the performance required. This work attempts to transfer the TrackYourTinnitus database from MariaDB to SQL Server. The system migration aims to ensure smooth database operations when dealing with data on a large scale as well as to benefit from the advanced features of T-SQL, the query language used by SQL Server.