Oracle Ireland employee # 74 signing off...

I will shortly be starting my life outside Oracle after some 15 years there. My last day is today.

I've enjoyed it immensely and am proud of our accomplishments. It really doesn't seem like 15 years, and I have been lucky to work on some very exciting projects with some very clever people, many of whom have become friends. I look forward to hearing about all the new releases coming from Database Tools in the future.

Next it is two weeks holidays in France (I hope the weather gets better!) and then the beginning of my next adventure in a new company. More on that later.

I think I'll continue to blog on database tools topics.

Access migration to Application Express without direct SQL Access

I got asked a question recently how to complete an Access migration when you don't have direct SQL access to the Oracle instance where Oracle Application Express is installed (e.g. apex.oracle.com)?

For dealing with the application part, it is not an issue as the Application Migration Workshop feature of APEX (3.0+) allows you to load the results from the Oracle Migration Workbench Exporter for Microsoft Access, so you can capture the meta data for Access Forms and Reports. You can even download a copy of the exporter from the workshop itself.

The challenge is really the schema and data migration part using Oracle SQL Developer (1.2+). By default SQL Developer expects to be able to make a SQL connection to the target Oracle database. However I did think about this use case as we were designing this new Migration Workbench tool. I will describe a solution below.

The only requirement, is that you have SQL access to any Oracle database (9iR2+), because the workbench is driven using an underlying migration repository. You could use the Express Edition of Oracle for this purpose, which is totally free, if you didn't have SQL access to an existing Oracle database.

So let me outline the main steps involved:

1. Start SQL Developer 1.2
2. Make sure you set the following preference: Tools -> Preferences -> Migration -> Generation Options: Least Privilege Schema Migration
   
3. Create a connection to your Access database. Make sure you can browse the tables in the access database and see the data
4. Export the table data to csv format: For each table you want to migrate, use the context menu associated with tables to export as csv format. Make sure you select an encoding that matches your target database. I try to keep everything in UTF-8
5. Create a connection to an Oracle schema.
6. Create a migration repository in this connection. You can do this via the context menu on a connection
7. From your Access connection, context menu, select: Capture Microsoft Access. This will launch the exporter and initiate the capture step of the migration.
8. Take your captured model and now create an Oracle (converted) model by selecting the captured model and via the context menu: Convert to Oracle Model
9. With you converted model, you can now create an object creation script using the context menu: Generate
10. The result of step 9 is presented in a SQL Worksheet, you can edit this to remove objects you are not interested in, then via File -> Save As, save the contents to a SQL file.
11. Login to your APEX Workspace
12. To execute the object creation script you have just created. Goto SQL Workshop -> SQL Scripts -> Upload.
    
13. Once the script is uploaded, View it and select the RUN action. This should create all your schema objects, view the results to make sure all the object were create successfully. You now be able to view these schema objects in the SQL Workshop -> Object Browser.
14. To load our CSV files we will use the Utilities -> Data Load/Unload -> Load, selecting Load Spreadsheet Data. You will do this for each table we want to load data into. Select Load To : Existing Table and Load From: Upload File. You may need to apply appropriate format masks to get the data to load properly.

Notes:

1. You should complete the schema and data migration part of your migration, prior to creating a migration project via the Application Migration Workshop.
2. You may have some post migration cleanup steps, if you had access auto increment columns in your tables, you will need to reset the values of the sequences we have created.
3. Another option to explore depending on your data, would be to export the data from Access tables as SQL INSERT statements, and then it just a simple matter of loading and run that SQL script via apex.