Foxpro to Oracle migration

[Sebastian Millies]

Does anyone know of a tool that can migrate a
database of VisualFoxpro *.DBF files to Oracle
10g directly? Should run on Windows.

What I currently do is to migrate Foxpro to MySQL
(using Alexander Eltsyn's dbf2mysql converter)
and then use the OMWB to migrate to Oracle. This
works fine (mostly), but involves much handiwork.

Thanks for any other suggestions,
Sebastian

[Frank van Bortel]

Sebastian Millies wrote: Does anyone know of a tool that can migrate a database of VisualFoxpro *.DBF files to Oracle 10g directly? Should run on Windows. What I currently do is to migrate Foxpro to MySQL (using Alexander Eltsyn's dbf2mysql converter) and then use the OMWB to migrate to Oracle. This works fine (mostly), but involves much handiwork. Thanks for any other suggestions, Sebastian
iirc, Foxpro (and any other dBaseII/III/IV) data files
are just fixed length records, with record 1 being the
data structure: you may be off better writing SQL*Loader
control files for each DBF file, and telling Loader to
skip the first record.

--
Regards,
Frank van Bortel

Top-posting is one way to shut me up...

[DA Morgan]

Sebastian Millies wrote: Does anyone know of a tool that can migrate a database of VisualFoxpro *.DBF files to Oracle 10g directly? Should run on Windows. What I currently do is to migrate Foxpro to MySQL (using Alexander Eltsyn's dbf2mysql converter) and then use the OMWB to migrate to Oracle. This works fine (mostly), but involves much handiwork. Thanks for any other suggestions, Sebastian

Given the nature of Visual FoxPro I'd suggest you dump
each table as a delimited ASCII file and then use SQL*Loader.

SQL*Loader demos can be found at www.psoug.org
click on Morgan's Library
click on SQL*Loader
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

[Guest]

You can use the FoxPro list or copy commands to dump the data to ascii
text files, then use Oracle SQL*Loader (8i or earlier) or Oracle
external tables (9i or later) to load them into your Oracle database,
which would require carefully creating the new Oracle structures to
match the old FoxPro structures. This takes a little time to set up,
but runs quickly and is ideal for a few tables with many rows of data.

Or, you can use PL/SQL to read directly from the .dbf file and create
tables of the same structure, using the code in the link from Tom
Kyte's site below:
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:711825134415
You would need to apply the changes for FoxPro to the original code for
DBASE, then perhaps add some additional modifications of your own to
loop through a list of tables. This saves having to set up the data
structures, but runs much slower than SQL*Loader on large data sets.
These is ideal for many tables with few rows in each table.

Or, you can use ODBC:
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:13401716754850

Or, you can search the web and pay some money for some third party tool
that will allow you to do it all through some GUI menu.

I have used SQL*Loader, external tables, and the PL/SQL method
succesfully and which I preferred depended on the circumstances. I
have not tried the others. You need to consider how many tables, how
many rows per table, and whether this is a one-time thing or going to
be done on a recurring basis. Sometmes it is easiest to use what you
are most familliar with and that sounds like what you have been doing.
But, if you are going to do a lot of this, then it is best to cut out
the middle step involving MySQL and go directly from FoxPro to Oracle.
I haven't used the Oracle Migration Workbench or Toolkit or whatever.
Won't it allow you to go directly from FoxPro to Oracle? It has been a
few years since I have worked with FoxPro, so converting FoxPro 2.6 for
DOS may have been a lot easier than converting Visual FoxPro.

[Frank Dietrich]

Hi Sebastian,

Sebastian Millies wrote: Does anyone know of a tool that can migrate a database of VisualFoxpro *.DBF files to Oracle 10g directly? Should run on Windows.

If you only like to get the data from DBF files into Oracle tables then
you can load the DBF table files with Access and transfer it over an
ODBC connection into your Oracle database.

Frank

[Sebastian Millies]

baboehme@hotmail.com wrote on 13 Sep 2005 13:31:46 -0700:
You can use the FoxPro list or copy commands to dump the data to ascii text files, then use Oracle SQL*Loader (8i or earlier) or Oracle external tables (9i or later) to load them into your Oracle database, which would require carefully creating the new Oracle structures to match the old FoxPro structures. This takes a little time to set up, but runs quickly and is ideal for a few tables with many rows of data.

Thanks everyone for your help. I'm going with SQL*Loader now to import
the raw data, and will use PL/SQL to process them into a new schema.

-- Sebastian

[tony miller]

You can also use the Foxpro upsizing wizard provided in the Visal Foxpro
product..

See the attached link for documnetation on it!!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/fox7help/html/dgUpsizing_Visual_FoxPro_Databases.asp

"Sebastian Millies" <REPLACE-OBVIOUSsDOTmillies@idsMINUSscheer.de> wrote in
message news:1uo0n0fehtgna.kefju4o3h95f.dlg@40tude.net... Does anyone know of a tool that can migrate a database of VisualFoxpro *.DBF files to Oracle 10g directly? Should run on Windows. What I currently do is to migrate Foxpro to MySQL (using Alexander Eltsyn's dbf2mysql converter) and then use the OMWB to migrate to Oracle. This works fine (mostly), but involves much handiwork. Thanks for any other suggestions, Sebastian

[pasoccerdave]

I've found this thread very worthwhile. Unfortunately, the FoxPro 2.x tables I was recently handed contain a number of Memo fields. Any suggestions on how to capture that data as well? The database copy command doesn't appear to extract memo fields?