Transfering Informix data to Oracle?
I have never used Informix, but am an Oracle DBA. I need some "newbie" help with a situation I now find myself in. One of my clients has a Sun Sparc-clone running some version of Informix (probably one or two years old?) under SunOS 4.1.3_U1 (pre-Solaris). I will be installing a brand new HP9000 server running Oracle. My problem is trying to migrate some of their existing data over to this new server. I am only interested in a few tables and columns - pretty simple schema, but lots of data. Since this machine is in production at a customer site, I will only have a limited amount of time (a couple days) to do this, and I positively can't afford to destroy their database because of my ignorance. If I can just get the raw data in some database-neutral format, I can handle getting it into Oracle correctly. I don't care about keys, indices, or any of the other database attributes - just the plain old data row-by-row. First, for the real basics...Is there a general interactive SQL tool under Informix like Oracle's SQL*PLUS, and if so how would I execute it? Is it line based or curses based? Can you capture the output of a SELECT into a file? Now, is there an easy way to "export/dump" a table in a plain field-separated ASCII file. Do I have to worry about disabling headers or page breaks like in Oracle? Also, if this is not feasable, can I get some output which is reasonably parsable by an awk or tcl script? Transactional integrity on the read is not a big deal - I can have exclusive access to the whole database while I do this if needed. I would really appreciate any help and pointers. Unfortunately I don't have the time or access to Informix to experiment or hunt down manuals to figure this out myself. Deron -- Mr. Deron E. Meranda Technical Staff Member/System Administrator email #1: <dmeranda@acm.org> MedPlus, Inc.; 8805 Governor's Hill Drive or #2: <dmeranda@iac.net> Cincinnati, Ohio 45249, USA PGP Encryption Key: finger #2 WWW Home Page: http://www.iac.net/~dmeranda -- Mr. Deron E. Meranda Technical Staff Member/System Administrator email #1: <dmeranda@acm.org> MedPlus, Inc.; 8805 Governor's Hill Drive or #2: <dmeranda@iac.net> Cincinnati, Ohio 45249, USA PGP Encryption Key: finger #2 WWW Home Page: http://www.iac.net/~dmeranda