Question

I have an old CMS I built using Coldfusion. I would like to get the data from the old CMS to the new Ruby on Rails app. It’s not a huge set, only about 1300 records. I need some advice/ideas.

The databases are on separate servers now but that can be fixed, and since I’ve followed the “Sensible Defaults” of RoR, the database structure is different.

Example of old data structure:

Old CMS Table Example:

CONTENT_ID  int
CONTENT_NAME    varchar 150
CONTENT_DESC    varchar 500
CONTENT_ACTIVE  tinyint
CONTENT_URL varchar 200

New RoR CMS Table Example:

id  int
name    varchar 255
visible tinyint 1
content text
created_at  datetime
updated_at  datetime

I’m a RoR newbie so I don’t even know where to begin. I was going to use a program like Navicat and just migrate the data from one server to another. Would that be okay? It has a utility that will allow you to map columns.

Answer 1

Using either CSV (comma-separated) or pipe-delimited plain text files to shuttle data dumps between different SQL engines has been the local favorite. CSV support is baked right into Ruby’s standard lib.