Migrating RMS to Oracle

[russel pham]

Hi,
My company is trying to migrate from RMS to Oracle 10g. Has anyone done this? Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Yes, folks have done this.

There are many solutions, with various degrees of succes and various levels of complexity.

IMHO you should focus on working with Oracle, and Oracle savvy contracters / consultants (like myself :-), to tackle this problem more so than focussing on the existing RMS part.

It will be trivial, or at least not overly difficult, to load up your existing RMS (indexed) file data into Oracle using standard tools like SQL*loader.

The hard part is what you are going to do with that data.

Some folks opt for a bunch of 'per file' subroutines to convert RMS record access to 'singleton selects' against Oracle tables.

I geneally don't like those solution
They severely constrain Oracle in doing its job.
They severely constrain your data 'architects' to come up with a clean schema.
Still, sometimes it is the right choice, notably if the record access is already in 'modules' / functions and not scattered through the source.

IMHO you should start with a clean slate, think TRANSACTIONAL, think Oracle. Only look back at RMS as an initial source of data, not as a model to access that data.

Hope this helps some,
Hein van den Heuvel

HvdH Perfomance Consulting