I am not a DBA, obviously. I did have to work as one, but that was a lot of years ago. So, pardon me if this is a dumb question.
You say you're stuck with it. Can't you just change a few things, shut down for a little while, export your data, and insert it into a new DB? I know it is hard to do it with writes happening at the same time, but it seems like you could freeze it as read only, extract the data, and put it into a DB that has been prepped ahead of time and tested.
I know we did this more than once BUT it wasn't with public facing data and we were able to migrate while still working on existing data. We just couldn't add more data while doing so.
You say you're stuck with it. Can't you just change a few things, shut down for a little while, export your data, and insert it into a new DB? I know it is hard to do it with writes happening at the same time, but it seems like you could freeze it as read only, extract the data, and put it into a DB that has been prepped ahead of time and tested.
I know we did this more than once BUT it wasn't with public facing data and we were able to migrate while still working on existing data. We just couldn't add more data while doing so.