Question

I have two Oracle tables, an old one and a new one.
The old one was poorly designed (more so than mine, mind you) but there is a lot of current data that needs to be migrated into the new table that I created.

The new table has new columns, different columns.

I thought of just writing a PHP script or something with a whole bunch of string replacement… clearly that’s a stupid way to do it though.

I would really like to be able to clean up the data a bit along the way as well. Some it was stored with markup in it (ex: “
First Name
“), lots of blank space, etc, so I would really like to fix all that before putting it into the new table.

Does anyone have any experience doing something like this? What should I do?

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

I’d checkout an ETL tool like Pentaho Kettle. You’ll be able to query the data from the old table, transform and clean it up, and re-insert it into the new table, all with a nice WYSIWYG tool.

Here’s a previous question i answered regarding data migration and manipulation with Kettle.
Using Pentaho Kettle, how do I load multiple tables from a single table while keeping referential integrity?