Oracle Migration Workbench – Part Three

At the end of Part Two,
we finished loading data from the MySQL database into the Oracle
database/repository. The owner of the imported data was root, the privileged
owner in the MySQL database “omwb.” In Part Three, we will go into more detail
about the Migration Workbench console and learn how to configure some options.
At the end of this article, we will start our preparation for using OMWB to
migrate a SQL Server 2000 database.

What’s in Oracle Migration Workbench?

With Migration Workbench, like most Oracle products, once
you dig into the documentation, you will find a lot of useful information.
Several interesting features include the installation/deinstallation process,
enabling the use of a browser other than Internet Explorer, quick access to documentation,
and customizing/viewing the migration log.

With the 10g version of OMWB, installation (in case you have
not already done it) is very straightforward. Download the utility and unzip
it. That is about as simple as it gets. If installing OMWB on user-type PC’s,
you may need to perform the installation as a member of the administrator
group, but that is true of many PC’s where regular users do not have install
software privileges.

A quick mention of Windows administration: user installs are
controlled via a group policy, and the Group Policy editor is accessed via
Start>Run>gpedit.msc. You do not normally see the Group Policy console,
and the gpedit.msc command is but one way to access it. Note the next to last
setting in the list — change the state via right click Properties.

Does uninstalling Migration Workbench require use of the
Oracle Universal Installer? The answer is: it depends on which version of OMWB you
are using. With version 10g, all you need to do is delete the OMWB install
directory. With version 9.2.0.16 or earlier, you need OUI.

Migration Workbench comes with a product overview or Quick
Tour (found under the Help menu). If you are a non-Internet Explorer type of
person, you can tell OMWB which browser to use. For example, to use Netscape,
all you have to do is edit the state.properties file found in the bin directory.
The file generally looks like this after installation (substitute username,
host, port, and SID as necessary):


UseDefaultRepository=0
Username=tiger
Host=localhost
Port=1521
SID=db00
BROWSER_PATH=

To set Netscape as your browser of choice to see the Quick
Tour’s HTML pages, supply the path to the browser executable (no quotation
marks needed):


UseDefaultRepository=0
Username=tiger
Host=localhost
Port=1521
SID=db00
BROWSER_PATH=C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape\Netscp.exe

To confirm this, start OMWB and enter the Quick Tour.

The Help menu on the Migration Workbench console is probably
the best help menu from Oracle.

Notice that the list of options contains a link to the MySQL
Reference Guide, among other documents. When we cover a SQL Server migration, we
will come back here to see if the SQL Server Reference Guide is installed (via
HTML pages). The help menu items map to the following Oracle document part
numbers/PDF files, which beats having to download these from OTN.

Menu Item

Oracle Part Number (PDF document)

Release Notes

B13978_02

User’s Guide

B13852_01

MySQL 3.22/3.23 Reference
Guide

B13911_01

Frequently Asked Questions

B10258_01

One last item on the menu to mention is the Online Technical
Support. Selecting that option shows the following:

What is noteworthy about this is the amount of support you
can get from Oracle — even if you do not have a CSI. Granted, you probably won’t
have immediate priority, but what other Oracle products can you name that offer
free technical support via email?

The troubleshooting road map found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/support/tech/migration/workbench/index.html
is pretty useful. In part, it shows:

Finally, one other neat feature of OMWB is the option of
customizing the informational items recorded in migration log. The types of
messages are found under Tools>Options. The types of messages you can choose
to have shown (or hidden) are informational, error, warning, summary, and
debug.

In the last article, there was a picture of the migration
log. The log showed a detailed list of what took place during the migration. A
very nice feature of OMWB is its ability to present the log to you in HTML
format, and the reporting is fairly impressive. Access the report via
Report>Generate Database Migration Report. The report is fairly well
cross-referenced.

The report on the database shows the following.

Drilling down into the report, we can see that the warning
previously reported is related to a data type mismatch (kind of).

All I entered for the hiredate was the date, so the loss of
more granular information (in this case) is no big deal. If milliseconds
matter, then you will want to be sure your source reflects that information. If
it is not there to begin with, Oracle certainly cannot divine it (hence, the
default time of “12:00:00”).

Steve Callan
Steve Callan
Steve is an Oracle DBA (OCP 8i and 9i)/developer working in Denver. His Oracle experience also includes Forms and Reports, Oracle9iAS and Oracle9iDS.

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