Migrating from VMS to NT Server

From: Artful Dodger <oradba_at_nospam.answerdude.net>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 17:03:25 -0500
Message-ID: <b6fmnf$365$1_at_news.storm.ca>


Our customer is considering a migration option which involves getting rid of their seventeen Dec Alpha 2000 servers running Oracle 8.1.7 on OpenVMS and replacing them with NT servers. They are considering this option for what they say are "supportability reasons". From the few people I've spoken to on the subject, I personally think they may be making a mistake, but while I may have some input, the decision is not mine.

The customer has requested information from me with regard to the level of effort required to perform the migration. While I have done VMS and Oracle version upgrades, I have never actually migrated an Oracle database across operating systems.

Has anyone actually been involved in transferring an Oracle database from a VMS platform to an NT platform? Without knowing anything, I would think it would be enough to install the RDBMS on the NT server, duplicate the tablespaces which exist on our Alpha, then do a full database export (EXP) from the Alpha and import into the NT. Will this work? Are there any pitfalls I should watch out for? (Perhaps weird character translations between platforms or something?) If you have actually done this conversion, I'd love to hear how it went, especially as far as avoiding any mistakes you may have made, or things which, if not done correctly, will bite me in the ass later...

Any advice is considered good advice. If you reply, if at all possible, a CC: to my e-mail oradba_at_nospam.answerdude.net (remove the "nospam") would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dodger Received on Thu Apr 03 2003 - 00:03:25 CEST

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