Content provided by Prabu Natarajan and Ricardo Llama.

Most new APS projects start with a small POC before doing a full-blown implementation. For Ortems projects, the POC is often designed in-house using a Firebird database. After a successful design, the intent is to mirror this using the customer’s Ortems environment, where the database is MS SQL or Oracle SQL server.

The project team facing this kind of challenge can decide to do a fresh configuration and loading of master data in the SQL database manually, which is obviously time-consuming. VIC would be a useful tool to load the master data; however, there is not much help for moving the configurations. An alternate approach is to perform a database transformation – transform firebird data to SQL data. This eliminates the need for repetition of the activities performed during the design of the POC.

The database transformation process is simple and efficient, takes less than 2 hours on the first attempt, and comprises six steps.
Step 1: Select the firebird GDB file for the transformation, using the Environment Management module:

Step 2: Launch the VIC IBU module, and after connecting to the relevant environment, start the generation of Scripts and tables.

Step 3: Select the new location for the SQL script, the name and the new database type. In this example, the new database would be MSSQL.

After a successful generation, the new script is placed in the selected file directory.

Step 5: After creating the database, run the scripts 010_tabl through 070_trig located under \ORTEMS\APS\scripts\mssql\bdt\create to prepare the database for loading:

Step 6: Run the script generated by the VIC IBU module followed by, script 110_trigAudit. A successful run would have the new SQL database ready for use in the Environment Management module.

All images and names are property of Dassault Systèmes® and D4M International®.