Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Support for third party database migrations to Oracle Using SQL Developer

As you all may or may not be aware of, in the past year or so, I have been busy writing a book on database migrations to Oracle 10g/11g using the freely available migration tools from Oracle. Originally these tools were in the form of what is called the Oracle Migration Workbench or OMWB for short. In 2006, Oracle released a development environment called SQL Developer.

Oracle has added migration tools to their flagship development product called SQL Developer which used to be called Raptor in the first beta version that will be the focus for migration and development tasks.

However, there are a few gotchas with SQL Developer tool in terms of third party migrations. Oracle as of yet after discussions with product management at Oracle on the SQL Developer team has no support in SQL Developer yet for IBM DB2 UDB and Informix migrations to Oracle using SQL Developer. SO, in spite of what Oracle may say, you still need to use the Oracle Migration Workbench if you wish to migrate off of IBM DB2 UDB or Informix to Oracle. After a brief chat with Sue Harper whom is the product manager at Oracle for SQL Developer, she was kind enough to let me know that support is coming eventually within SQL Developer in a future release to support Informix and IBM DB2 migrations to Oracle.

2 comments:

Sue said...

Ben,

You make it sound as if SQL Developer is a future product! Raptor was the code name in the first few months some 2 years ago. The first production release of SQL Developer was March 2006. We released the initial Migration Workbench support in SQL Developer 1.2, in August 2007. SQL Developer 1.5, released in April 2008 now includes support for Sybase. So SQL Developer supports migration from MS SQL Server and Access, MySQL and Sybase. The next area we are working on is adding DB2 support. For more information the Migration Workbench statement of direction has been available for some time.
Please see the SQL Developer pages on OTN and the Migration Workbench for more details.

Regards
Sue Harper
SQL Developer Product Manager

skymaster said...

Sue,

Good point, I updated the blog to reflect this. Thank you :-)

As a database professional with experience on both Oracle and DB2, I am definitely looking forward to DB2 support in SQL Developer!

Cheers,
Ben Prusinski