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I’m looking at an application that uses an old version of Informix database (standard engine 7 – 7.23C1). I’m investigating ways to migrate some tables and data from Informix to Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008.
Are there any tools out there that can make this migration less painful? There are hundreds of tables that need to be migrated, doing it manually will take a very long time.
How old is ‘old’? And is the Informix DBMS one of the OnLine family or is it SE (Standard Engine)? Roughly: which version of which Informix DBMS running on which platform? However, the answer is actually largely independent of DBMS or version (but if you have an old enough system, it might actually matter). I assume that the Informix installation is still operational; you still have the working Informix software.
The best tool to get the schema and data out of the Informix database is dbschema. For a database called
somedb, this will create a directorysomedb.expcontainingsomedb.sqland a series of unload files. The schema is, obviously, designed for Informix; you will need to modify that to suit SQL Server. The data is in Informix’s standard unload format, which uses pipe-separated fields with backslash as an escape character. You will have to devise a method of converting that to SQL Server’s preferred unload format.