Re: Conversion to postgresql

On Thursday 2004-05-20 15:34, Craig White wrote:
> Have data in Filemaker Pro - want to move it to postgresql
>
> Filemaker can export to tab delimited, csv, dbf

Short version:

See the pg COPY command.

> apparently there was a utility called dbf2pg but all links to that are
> dead
>
> There is a commercial product called 'Filemaker Migrator' - commercial
> ($100) not too much money to buy but destroys open source initiative.

( @#$% dogmatic freeware fundamentalists.)

It might be worth the ideological compromise if you are only going to use it
once (or if you were going to use it a lot but it would save lots of money.)

> Seems as though there is much more out there utility wise for mySQL vs.
> pg but that's the breaks.

There is no denying that MySQL has a *MUCH* larger market share than
Postgresql and thus has a many, many more goodies available.

> Is there some utility that my googles and freshmeat searches are
> missing?

(Appologies if this is insultingly basic.)

I don't have much time on Postgresql. It sounds like you either want a
direct, magic connection. It would automigrate the Filemaker schema to pg
and then autopopulate the same. Migration complete (good luck) .

(You *could* write your own with something like PERL with a pg_dumpall file
format as the program's output target. That is more work than my lazy
programmer self would want to do, however.)

The next step down would be something like MS SQL Server DTS that provides a
slick visual programming language for data migration. (Doesn't exist for
pg.)

More realistically you want something like Oracle's SQL*Loader. You would
have to re-create the Filemaker schema by hand writing DDL. Then you dump
the data from Filemaker table-by-table. Then you load it to the new PG
database/schema table-by-table.

I had to resort to third party documentation (Geschwinde and Sch&oumlaut;nig
2001) to find that the PG built in for this is the COPY command. It is not
nearly as elegant or complete as SQL loader but should work.

Note also:
http://www.postgresql.org/
has a newbie mailing list where this sort of question would no doubt be very
welcome.
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