@MuraliKaundinya, @Sankari, friends:
Just to put my 2 cents out here in writing, because this conversation is happening with different people in different places:
I understand that investing in ETLs is unpopular, particular if the version drift forces you to go back. But I would NOT do the upgrading, unless it’s a really temporary stopgap solution. The reason we are changing the CDM is to fix problems and to enable new important use cases. These upgrade scripts by their nature cannot go along with these.
The CDM, even though it requires an upfront investment, is the foundation for a number of things:
- The ability to do division of labor in the community: Different people with different skillsets and assets can collaborate in solutions, making OHDSI the strong community it is now.
- The ability to do true Remote and Federated Studies, which means we can blindly send queries and analysis code to data partner where we never had and probably never will have direct data access to, and still get correct results.
- A true scale. We already have above 1 Billlion patients we can study. This alone will make answering of many questions feasible which now are impossible to tackle.
The community will help you. And if you don’t have the capacity, technology or skillset to do your own ETLing there are a bunch of folks who will gladly do it for you if you can find a way to compensate them.