NHS Benchmarking Network: zero-downtime data modernisation
Millions of NHS benchmarking records migrated from legacy MS-SQL to PostgreSQL with zero downtime and 100% data integrity on a platform serving 14,000+ healthcare leaders across 600+ NHS organisations.
- Client
- NHS Benchmarking Network
- Role
- Backend engineer, DevOps engineer & solutions architect
- Completed
- Jun 2026
- Python
- FastAPI
- dltHub
- PostgreSQL
- Azure
- GitLab CI
- Docker
The operating constraint
The world's largest healthcare benchmarking service - 14,000+ healthcare leaders across 600+ NHS organisations - depended on historical data held in a legacy MS-SQL estate. The platform could not pause for a migration: reporting continuity is the product.
The intervention
A cloud-native migration pipeline built in Python with dltHub, moving records across all UK nations behind validation gates - inside a wider replatform to FastAPI on Azure with containerised, semantic-versioned, merge-gated CI/CD that cut release times by 75%.
The evidence
- of healthcare records migrated across all UK nations
- Millions
- data integrity — zero records lost, zero corruption
- 100%
- downtime — continuous service availability throughout
- 0
- faster release cycles from the surrounding CI/CD discipline
- 75%
“Fundamentally transformed our technical architecture, delivery capability, and organizational maturity.”