Oracle SQL Developer Migration Workbench Early Adopter Release

Last week we released on OTN the early adopter release of the Oracle SQL Developer Migration Workbench. You can find more details about it here. It was a very important release for us, and marks the start of a new generation of migration tools.

It is nearly 10 years ago when the original Oracle Migration Workbench was released, we supported migrating SQL Server 6.5 to Oracle8 then. At that time, I believe we were the first to introduce a GUI tool. Previously we had provided a series of migration scripts (shell based + SQL) and a stored procedure converter utility. We went on to add support for Access, Sybase, Informix, DB2 utilizing the same user interface by leveraging our plugin architecture. Over the years we have seen our database competitors and others release similar migration tools for their databases.

With this release, I believe we have made the same dramatic shift again that we did back in 1998. By integrating our migration tool as a extension of SQL developer (our very popular tool for database developers) we have provided our users with a modern intuitive UI tightly integrated into an IDE, that should make users even more productive as they carry out database migrations. I don't believe any of our competitors have delivered such tight integration.

This initial release supports Microsoft SQL Server, Access and MySQL. We are introducing support for migrating Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with this release. These third party databases represents the most popular downloads for our existing Oracle Migration Workbench. We will add further platforms in the future. We have also architected this solution, to make it even easier to extend and leverage the rich core migration functionality that we have developed. We hope that others will also extend this tool going forward adding support for additional databases.

The focus now, is on completing some features which missed the cut for the early adopter release, (more on that in a later post) , getting feedback from our user community and fixing as many reported bugs to ensure the highest possible quality release, when we go production, as SQL Developer 1.2. I encourage you to try it out and provide us with feedback. We have setup a comment application which you can provide us with feedback. You can access it here.

Some of my favorite features of this new release includes:

• Least privilege migration - You no longer need dba privileges
• Online Data Move - We have enhanced the online data move and provide parallel data move and the degree of parallelism is configurable
• New T/SQL parser - We have completing rewritten our T/SQL parser. If I'm honest, it was long over due, but this new parser, provides us with the right foundation for a much greater level of automation in converting complex objects (stored procedures, views, triggers)
• Translation Scratch Editor - allows for the instant translation of Transact SQL or Microsoft Access SQL to PL/SQL or SQL.
• Translation Difference Viewer - a color-coded side-by-side viewer to display semantic similarities between the source and translated code.

Looking forward to reviewing the feedback from our user community, getting those missing features completed and getting this new tool to production status as part of SQL Developer 1.2