[Info-vax] Migrating data from RMS : Available tools

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-02-19 07:33:42 +0000, Robert Nelson said:

> Hello List

Hello Most Honored New Comp.Os.VMS Newsgroup user!   Welcome to the 
dark side!   We have cookies!

> We would like to migrate data off RMS-based index files. The 2 files 
> have about 30 million records combined.
> 
> Our goal is to move the data from RMS to Oracle (not RDB). I would like 
> to know if there are tools that can assist with this : with error 
> logging, repeatability and customisation.
> 
> My initial investigation's results are :
> 1. ConnX - connect to RMS, configure CDDs and extract RMS data to CSV. 
> Use SQL loader to load data to Oracle. This is a two step process and 
> needs manual steps to extract data from RMS to CSV, verify errors.
> 
> 2. I remember Attinuity as a leading vendor for providing solutions to 
> access VMS systems. However, their Replicate product seems to support 
> only DBMS sources. No mention of RMS.
> 
> 3. Oracle Gateways : No love for RMS ?
> 
> 4. Open Transl8 - marketed by advancedcomputersoftware & Transoft.
> 
> What do you all think?

Design a table or three for the database, and then write a loop that 
reads the records from the RMS file, and either write SQL for import, 
or that directly imported the data.

Outside of the few folks using Oracle CDD/Repository to store their 
data definitions, there's no generic definition of what's in the fields 
of an RMS record (outside of the fields that are keys), which means 
reverse-engineering the file or (easier) reverse-engineering the source 
code for the record layout and keys.

This loop isn't at all difficult to write, and anything past a thousand 
records in the database — or whatever point where manual entry becomes 
less economical than writing the importation tool — only factors into 
the run-time for the conversion tool.

Yeah, you might be able to find something that can export CDD 
definitions into a tool, or some generic RMS-to-SQL conversion tool, 
not that I've looked for nor seen that.   But full brute-force isn't 
difficult, either.


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