Re: Migrating from VMS to NT Server

"Artful Dodger" <oradba_at_nospam.answerdude.net> wrote in message news:<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.

Hey, VMS is literally in the sunset of it's life, so at this point anything is better than doing nothing. A couple of years ago I posted to someone you have at least a couple years before really starting to worry...

On the other hand, last week I saw the insides of a "supermicro" used as a server, where you could see quite clearly where the hot air blew off each of the processors and fried the nearby capacitors. The funny thing was, it had been upgraded from NT to the newest whatever, and then started to go bad (booting, dying, booting, dying...) But reloading NT, it seemed to work OK...

>
> 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

Weird character translations, but not between platforms. exp/imp automatically converts between character sets. I've seen situations where custom-written datatypes (and even the use of some common tools with regular data) force 8-bit data into US7ASCII, with data-changing results on import into an 8-bit character set.

> 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...

How big the bite will be depends very much on the implementation specifics on the vms platform. Are they using rman or a bunch of com files to do backups? What kind and type of backups? What else are they using com files for? Are they doing any strange stuff, such as cobol-like data stuffed into the db, or even stuff written in BLISS? Do they have VMS specific application software? A common problem on VMS derived systems is they have old (even '60s!) design stuff. Sometimes there is middleware that is actually running translations of old stuff (I've even seen IBM assemblerish stuff).

I've seen stuff run exactly the same on the two platforms, so it is possible. I've also seen stuff that is so bad it can't hardly migrate to another identical machine. So, it depends.

>
> 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.

Any advice from a marketing person is suspect! :-)

>
> Thanks,
>
> Dodger

jg

--
_at_home.com is bogus.
Building Dodger Stadium required moving an old graveyard.