Migrating Applications to ASE – Your Experience of DML Migration?

Summary:   Migrating SQL between  different manufacturer’s RDBMS products presents significant challenges.

Migrating  an application from one vendors RDBMS to another can beconsidered as a number of separate – though obviously closely related facets. I.e :-

• -       schema
• -       data
• -       interfaces
• -       infrastructure
• -       database code
• -       etc.

Databases schemas – DDL -  are generally the easiest component to migrate, though of course not without challenges.   SAP provide a tool to complete this (PowerDesigner) – though completing a schema migration manually does not present major difficulties.

Data?  Not without its challenges – but you’ll generally have a number of options to get data migrated across – and SAP offers a number of options here.

Database code – DML.  Generally the biggest challenge.   Converting one SQL dialect to another is usually a non-trivial task.

Now moving a SAP installation to SAP database solution (ASE/IQ) does not require the client to delivery Schema/Data migration/Database code solutions – these are provided by SAP – it’s part of the application.

Things get trickier when migrating your in house applications to ASE.   Not that this problem is specific to ASE  - you’ll face it when moving from/to any database vendors. 

So – how can you reduce the pain of migrating your DML to ASE from other database vendors?

Some vendors provide tools to assist in migrating code to their RDBMS.  For example Microsoft provide Sql Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) . Oracle also provide a product.

SSMA offers to ‘make it easy’ to migrate to SQL Server.  I have significant experience with this product – which I utilized during a number of migration projects.   How useful was it? Well it proved useful for completing a reasonably quick, partial migration.  This was found to be mainly useful for developing a Proof Of Concept offering – i.e. rapidly migrating a small volume of code.  However SSMA would comment out large chunks of code it could not convert – and much code was functionally incorrect (or failed to meet performance requirements) when migrated.   It  did not remove the biggest chunk of hard work required to migrate code to SQL Server. 

A third party tool (SWISQL) offers to complete SQL migration to ASE. 

So  -  does anyone have experience of  migrating to ASE from other  vendors product?