In the world of modern relational databases PostgreSQL has become one of the most popular open-source system offering wide range of advanced features such as compliance with SQL standard, sophisticated locking, nested transactions, on-demand scalability and many others. Another important benefit of the product is flexibility of open-source software. These are reasons why many companies and organizations migrate their databases away from proprietary database management systems with a high total cost of ownership and toward PostgreSQL.
The procedure of database migration to or from such complicated DBMS as PostgreSQL may be quite time and resource consuming, especially for large corporate data warehouses. Also, there is a high risk of data loss or corruption due to human factor when database migration is not fully automated. That’s why many database administrators use special software tools to automate database migration. PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit is one of such products offered by Intelligent Converters, a software company specialized in database migration since 2001.
PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit is a collection of tools to migrate data from SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft Access, FoxPro, IBM DB2, SQLite and MS Excel to PostgreSQL and vice versa.
The product utilizes low-level libraries to reach the best performance of reading and writing data. The vendor benchmarks show 20 thousand rows per second on contemporary hardware platforms. Each database migration tool from PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit offers command line support to automate migration procedure. Besides every tool can store conversion settings into a profile to simplify subsequent runs of the migration for the same data source and destination.
For those users who need even more control over the database migration, PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit offers option to export the data source into a script file besides the direct transfer to PostgreSQL server. The script contains SQL commands to create all tables, indexes, constraints and to insert the data. This may be used when there is no remote connection to the target PostgreSQL server. In such situation the resulting script should be uploaded to the target server over SSH and then imported into the PostgreSQL database using any suitable client tool.
PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit offers the following capabilities:
- All PostgreSQL versions are supported starting from v9 as well as SAAS implementations such as Azure and Amazon RDS
- Table definitions, data, indexes, constraints and views are migrated
- ‘Edit table’ option allows to modify the column names, types, default values and attributes
- Merge and synchronize modes to process existing PostgreSQL tables
- Full Unicode support
- Intuitive wizard-style interface with comprehensive documentation
At the same time, PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit has the limitations as follows:
- Sophisticated views that include syntax patterns having no direct PostgreSQL equivalent may not be converted correctly
- Stored procedures, functions and triggers are not migrated into PostgreSQL
- Only basic full-scan algorithm of database synchronization is supported. For incremental trigger-based synchronization the dedicated tools must be used.
- Free trial version of the product migrates up to fifty rows per table and does not create foreign keys.
For more information about PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit visit official website of Intelligent Converters.
