Hi there,

we had a similar situation a few years back when we acquired company XYZ567. I was not greatly involved in the planning, but gave my suggestions to the planners.

I would suggest an internal audit of the systems. What do the systems do, what are they (MSSQL, MySql,Oracle). If the last DBA quit 2 months ago, then I would also immediately check that "simple" things are still working (backups come to mind). Also quite important: who has access to what - such takeovers can be a trigger for corporate espionage / "accidental" data loss etc.

Our takeover went relatively smoothly, an important factor was that we basically went with a group from our team and did the big audit/system integration directly at their offices. It helps a great deal if you work directly with the people on the other side. They need to see you are not an evil corporation taking over their world, the human touch is important here.

One important thing mentioned by David B was the possibility of alienation of the newly acquired colleagues. This is often a difficult problem, company takeovers generally involve layoffs and these layoffs are normally targeted at the company that was taken over. The new colleagues will most likely be worrying that their job is now in danger and this does not help them help you! So it is walking on eggshells time!

It's quite a fun thing to do, you can look at a complete system that has run for some time but was built with a whole different view of the world. You may find some interesting implementations that could be useful elsewhere, but you may also find some scary implementations that need to be looked asap.

My 2 Cents.

GermanDBA