Hello List,

A few weeks ago I asked the Interbase list on hints to help with an urgent
Sybase to Interbase conversion, and said that I would keep the list
informed as to the result. Helen suggested that I move it over to this
list, so here it is (for what it is worth).

Since that post I have had another site installation to complete, and I
ended up not going to the Sybase customer's site anyway, one of my
employees went instead. Unfortunately, we won't even be proceeding with the
conversion, as the deal with this potential customer has gone sour, due to
a misunderstanding at the contract stage about them having to pay us an
amount for installation at each of their 4 sites.

David, the employee who went to their site, has some programming experience
with Interbase, and more experience configuring the applications that I
write at each of our installations. He is by no means a database expert. On
his initial inspection of the environment, we quickly determined that we
would not be able to easily set up a BDE (or ODBC) link to the database.
That isn't to say it wouldn't be easy, just that we didn't have the
knowledge or experience to do it quickly, and David isn't the type of
person to just "wing it". Instead, he was able to find a couple of books
and a help file for Sybase, and was quickly able to use one of the Sybase
management programs to connect to the database. A couple of commands later,
and he had a text file listing all the metadata of the database. He emailed
that to me, and we were able to determine that of the 147 tables in the
system, only 6 were of interest to us in converting their data to our
system - namely their customers, each customer's account details, the
account transactions, and a couple of other "lookup" tables for account
type etc.

It was also a simple matter, from within the same program, to "unload"
these specific tables into dBase format, simply by specifying ".dbf" as the
extension for the output file name. Presto, we had the 6 tables we needed
in a BDE-compatible format to process as we pleased.

The plan for a roll-out to the 4 sites (each with their own Sybase database
of the same format) was to be a script that "unloaded" the 6 tables from
Sybase into dBase format, and a Delphi program to "load" them into our
existing table structure in Interbase, doing any required conversion on the
fly.

Sybase's support of dBase format for external files would have made this
process quite simple. A more complete solution would have been to have the
Delphi program "unload" the data directly, however this would have required
that a BDE-compatible link be established at each site, by inexperienced
(with Sybase) installers. We decided that the manual 2-step process would
be more reliable in the field.

If you would like more details on the Sybase program used, and the commands
to access the metadata and unload the tables, then I can query David for
these details.



Regards,

Chris Heberle
Intouch Technology