Converting Sybase to Oracle 1

[bearywell]

Unfortunately the person who created the Impromptu catalog for Oracle has left our company. He did the converting of our Impromptu 6.0 reports to use the catalog but he didn't do them all now it is 2 weeks from go live and we have about 200 reports needing to convert and we don't know how. We are being told we have to rewrite them all.

In an e-mail he sent to another area he said "This catalog is VERY different from the original. Many fields have changed and many more have been added. I have experienced great difficulty converting old reports to the new catalog. A majority of the time, every field in the report has needed to be re-mapped. Can you provide me with a location of your active reports? I would like to copy and start converting, re-mapping or recreating these reports now, so they can be ready for the conversion."

Which to me sounds like rewriting was a final option not a beginning option. Please help go live is 9-15-01.

Dee x
HRIS Analyst

 

[snowman11]

We are also faced with converting Impromptu reports from another database (Empress) to Oracle. Simply re-pointing the catalog to the Oracle database does not seem to work, and re-writing the reports is not an attractive option - does anyone has any tips for easily converting? Has anyone undergone this exercise?

 

[n30er]

You will most likely need to rebuild the catalog in the new environment. Before you rebuild the catalog you will need to obtain the unique identifiers of the fields in the old catalog and create fields in the new catalog with the same unique id. The reports use those unique ids so you shouldn't have to rebuild them.

p.s. this all might be hard to do by 1 month ago (go live 9/15)...ha ha

 

[bearywell]

It turns out that having the same table names (unique identifier) is exactly what did the trick. We can pull up old reports from sybase catalog and point them to the oracle catalog and 90% read them just fine. But you need to make sure old catalog is not still in the same place as new catalog. If it cannot find the old catalog it will ask if you want to search for it? Point it to the new catalog and you get a message that says it will be getting new data from new catalog structure and is this ok? say yes and you are good to go. We were so happy because a lot of our personal reports we had not had time to rewrite.
Hope this helps.
D

 

[snowman11]

Many thanks for your prompt help.
Can you point me to how I can access these unique column ids?
Thanks again

 

[n30er]

I'm not sure if you can access them directly through the gui, but you can through the macro script language.

 

[bearywell]

When we created the new catalog we just made sure that if the table was named lawprod.employee and the fields were company, first, last etc... that in oracle it was lawora.employee company, first, last. Basically just make sure the naming conventions stay the same from one system to the other. I hope this makes sense to you.

 

[n30er]

Yes, however naming them the same will not necessarily give them the same internal unique ID, they would also have to be added in the same order, etc. The unique id is different than the name.

Glad your conversion was smooth.