Does anyone have experience in migration from Informix 9.20 UC4 to Oracle 10 g?
At the moment we are in decision making of switching to Oracle or still remain on Informix.
Are there any known problems regarding Baan IVc4 and Oracle? Any problems with the migration? We are planning to move on a new server with the new database.
We are grateful for every small reference.

Thank in advance,


Thomas

Hi Thomas,

First all all congratulations to this decision. Without starting a big Informix vs. oracle discussion here, my experience tells me, that Oracle is the right database for Baan.

Some thoughts here:

a) The "migration" will actually be the process of dumping the data with bdbpre and loading it again with bdbpost. There is no other way to do this.

b) The main problem of the migration will be the time needed. bdbpre and bdbpost tend to be around 4 times slower than for example exp/imp of Oracle.

c) You can improve a bit the bdbpre/bdbpost performance by setting high values for the variables SSTS_SET_ROWS, RDS_FULL, ORA_MAX_ARRAY_FETCH and ORA_MAX_ARRAY_INSERT. You have to experiment a bit with them. You can start with a value of 100 and increase it. If the value is too big, you export/import might crash with an error.

d) Otherwise you should not expect any other problems, but you might want to study other postings discussing general Oracle performance issues.

I hope this helped,

Markus

Hi Thomas,

Do you also have plans to switch your Operating System?
Right now you are using AIX and I would recommend SuSE Linux 9 instead.
This will allow you to save a lot of money on the yearly maintenance and the combination SuSE Linux 9 with Oracle 10g is very powerful.

Regards,

Edwin

THomas,

we also have recently migrated from MS -SQL 2000 to Oracle 10G, on AIX5.3, the performance is very good, and users are happy. as the markus had explained u have to use bdbpre/bdbpost only for migration, is the right way to go ahead.

other wise the database on AIX is stable and reliable.

with regards
Deepak

@Markus

Thanks for your references. I think we will bring up both databases on the new server. Then we will do the bdbpre/bdbpost stuff and I hope it will work fine. There will be no time problem, because of doing it on a new system. The old ones will remain running until everything is ok with the new system.

@Edwin

Sorry, there are no plans to switch to Linux with this new system. There will be several virtual machines on the server, all powered by one AIX OS.

@Deepak

It is good to hear that the database is stable and reliable. That is want we want to have.

So I am looking forward to the new system, not ordered yet, but I think the move to Oracle is inevitable after 10 years with Informix on BaaN.

I still be grateful for every small reference,

Thomas

the run times might still be an issue, because during the time auf dumping and loading, your users can obviously not use the old system and change the data.

Wether this is critical or not obviously depends on your amount of data. If your have around 100GB, then a normal weekend is allready too short. If you have much more, then your might need to spend some brainpower to get it done.