Migrating Oracle to DB2 Part 2

 

Please keep the comments coming and it seems there are a lot people interested in Oracle to DB2 conversions especially migrating from Oracle to DB2 for z/OS. The main questions were “How long does the migration from Oracle to DB2 really take?” and “When migrating from Oracle to DB2 what are the real problems that can occur?”

 

How long does the migration from Oracle to DB2 really take?

Based on my experience and conversations with the support people within the IBM team, the conversion is pretty simple and straight forward especially with the IBM Migration Toolkit (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/downloads/migration/mtk/index.html). The actual conversion of the database from Oracle to DB2 can be done in an afternoon because of DB2’s Oracle compatibility to Oracle and the toolkit. The IBM Toolkit has been built over many years, is customizable and provides many options for migrating from Oracle (and many other databases) to DB2. Also, on the toolkit page there is a huge amount of other detailed information on what the toolkit can do.

 

So the short answer is an afternoon but to be realistic it takes more time to verify application processing, stored procedures, triggers, user defined triggers (UDT) and functions (UDFs). These UDTs and UDFs can be very complex with specific Oracle syntax so extra attention is required. But most existing systems and applications are simple so the applications can be migrated from Oracle to DB2 in the time it takes your company to verify the conversion and become comfortable with it. This time can vary dramatically based on the company, application and criticality of the application.

 

When migrating from Oracle to DB2, what are the real problems that can occur?

The real problems come from the complexity of the original Oracle applications. Any specialized application code, UDFs or UDTs are potentially time consuming issues. The proprietary stored procedural language of Oracle is no longer an issue since the addition of DB2 stored procedure language Oracle compatibility improvements with DB2 LUW 9.7

 

Another consideration is the data migration of information from Oracle to DB2. Given the amount of data can be terabytes; the data transfer time can become migration time issue. This is usually not an issue because DB2 compression saves enormous amount of storage space (sometimes in the 60% to even 85% range) saving DB2 customers tremendous storage expense and huge processing savings through improved backup and recovery times. So it may be time consuming migrating your data from Oracle to DB2 but sometimes DB2 compression by itself provides your company a return on your migration investment.

 

The huge savings on database software licenses, savings on storage space and improved performance are the main return on investment points for migrating Oracle to DB2. Sometimes this can be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars after the migration expenses. Does your company need to save operational expenses within your IT budget? Migrating from Oracle to DB2 may be the ticket to save big dollars within your database environment.

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