Sybase ASE to MySQL: 100% Automated Migration

Ispirer Toolkit made it possible to save time and significantly accelerate migration to MySQL.

Results

Ispirer Toolkit and its customization helped to achieve the following results:

Background

The client is a provider of finance management technology in Canada. A platform provided by a company collects, analyzes, and normalizes financial data for various purposes. A comprehensive platform includes portfolio management, CRM, trade order management, compliance, and fee management which makes it the best-in-class solution for setting financial data to rights.

Challenge

Our client's large databases are a critical piece of infrastructure. However, the deprecation of Sybase ASE has become a barrier to modern application development. In addition, the outdated database was a financial burden for a company, so choosing a more affordable solution turned out to be the most optimal solution. These two main reasons became the decisive factors for the client to embark on a migration.

Solution

At first, the client tested Ispirer Toolkit to evaluate the quality of automatic conversion it provides. Having encountered two major difficulties, the customer approached Ispirer to resolve those difficulties. In turn, the Ispirer team found out that the most optimal solution was customizing the tool.

One may ask “why does customization take place if there were only 2 difficulties?”. The thing is that sometimes a source database contains numerous repetitive constructions or objects. That is why altering one conversion rule may correct multiple conversion errors, thus leading to significant automation rate improvement.

How has Ispirer Toolkit been customized for this project?

• Conversion of a procedure that returns multiple results using RETURN. In MySQL, a procedure cannot return values using RETURN. By default, Ispirer Toolkit creates additional procedure parameters to store the value of the RETURN construct. The Ispirer team has created another workaround to solve this difficulty. Now the toolkit creates an additional LOCAL parameter to store the value of the RETURN construct.
• Improved conversion of the STR_REPLACE function to the REPLACE function. If the function argument is NULL, then it is replaced with empty quotes. The arguments to the REPLACE() function in MySQL must be strings, so if the argument type is anything other than a string, the value of the argument is now explicitly cast to CHAR.

Outcome

As a result, the project resulted in a win-win solution that helped the client modernize the database from outdated to modern and convenient technology in a short time, and a set of new conversion rules was added to the Ispirer Toolkit core. Thus, subsequent Sybase ASE projects to MySQL will be carried out even faster, more efficiently and with better quality.