Migrating relational data to event store

I am migrating an old project towards CQRS using my own implementation of the CQRS pattern. The main reason I started this migration was to get rid of the mess the n-tier architecture had caused. The project however, as many others, is using a relational data store.

The current state in this process is that I have Commands that make changes and Query objects that isolate the querying. This means that from the client to server, I have a CQRS-ish way of changing and querying data although I do not publish any events from the changes, nor do I have a denormalized read store. I should mention that I also have pretty anaemic DTOs as my "domain model". All behaviour was distributed throughout the n-tier layers with its handlers, managers and all those horrible layer things.

I want to know how I can take the next step. What I want now is to start building a domain model that is in charge of its behaviour and the reason for that is that I want to start using an event store as the source of truth which brings me to my question:

How can I migrate the data from the relation data store into the event store?

I have an extremely normalized data model with very important data, which has to be migrated. I do understand that I cannot expect to capture any intent from that data as it is dead, but what should I do with it? Should I create loads of migration commands? It would be nice to hear your experience from this.

Solution

I’ve not had the opportunity to try this but something I wanted to try would work in a number of stages:

First map out all the events that the system would need.
Next introduce Views into the relational database to represent the events.
Write a custom utility to select from the views to build the correct event objects.
Have the custom utility write the event objects to the event store in correct sequence.
Finally make sure to refresh denormalised view models from the event store.

I would imagine that the sequence in which the events are written to the event store is a bit tricky and would require a bit of thought. But seeing as this is a migration process then as long as the final state of the domain is correct I don’t think it matters to much. If your relational tables have timestamps then this could help.

I decided that building event objects was more appropriate rather that creating commands because the relational data represents the domain for actions that have happened in the past.