Following the modern trend of migration from proprietary software to free open-source equivalents, a lot of companies replace commercial database management systems by PostgreSQL. Key reason of choosing PostgreSQL prior to/ for example, MySQL is its rich set of capabilities: object-relational features, efficient concurrency handling and many others.

Database migration is usually occurred according to extract-transform-load method. The idea of this approach is to extract definitions of tables, indexes, users, roles and logic entries from the source, make required transformations and import into the destination database. Then the data is processed using same steps. This task may take a lot of time and resources when doing it manually.

To simplify migration procedure Intelligent Converters, a software vendor focused on database migration and synchronization, developed dedicated solution called PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit. The product is able to migrate databases between all popular DBMS such as SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, MS Access, IBM DB2, Firebird, FoxPro, MS Excel, SQLite and PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit does not use any middleware components like ODBC to reach best performance of the data transfer. Each conversion tool included in the product uses efficient native API for reading and writing data. The average speed of the migration is 20000 rows per second on a modern hardware. Another important feature of PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit is command line support since it helps automate and schedule database migration tasks. At the end of migration all conversion settings can be stored into profile to simplify next runs.

PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit allows users to migrate the source database into a local script file instead of PostgreSQL server. The script file contains PostgreSQL statements to create all tables and to fill them with the data. This method is called“ indirect conversion” and it can be used when PostgreSQL server does not allow remote connection. In those cases, the resulting script file is transferred to machine running the database server and then it can be imported to PostgreSQL database locally using standard tools.

Capabilities of PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit:

• table structures are migrated with all required attributes (null flag, default values, etc) and appropriate type mapping
• data, indexes and constraints are migrated
• most views are migrated (except syntax patterns having no direct equivalent in the target DBMS)
• customization of the resulting tables(change name, type, default value and NULL attribute for any column)
• all versions of PostgreSQL are supported
• option to merge and synchronize the destination database with the source
• full Unicode support

PostgreSQL Migration Toolkit has been successfully tested with all popular SAAS platforms such as Amazon RDS / Aurora, Microsoft Azure SQL, Google Cloud SQL, and Heroku Postgres. Intelligent Converters company also provides tools for incremental synchronization between PostgreSQL and other popular DBMS that are not included in the toolkit. Visit the vendor official site for detailed information.