Infobright Blog

ICE Breaker
by Carl Gelbart

Migrating from one database to another is often a time-consuming, complicated and risky process. ICE Breaker is a collection of easy-to-use tools that allows you to migrate your data from other databases to Infobright.  Current ICE Breakers include tools to migrate from Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL databases to Infobright.  Others are in development.

ICE Breaker for MS SQL Server is a Windows program that extacts schema metadata from system tables in SQL Server and for each table in a selected schema, it generates:

- Infobright CREATE TABLE SQL statements
- Bulk copy program (bcp) command to extract the data from SQL Server into load files
- Infobright LOAD DATA commands to load the extacted data in thos load files

One would then manually execute the statements from those files (you can choose any table or tables of interest) as needed to create the tables, extract the data and load it into Infobright.  This reduces not only the time it takes to migrate, but reduces risks from mistakes like missed tables and typos on CREATE TABLE statements and reduces the learning curve to get started with Infobright.

ICE Breaker for MySQL is a Linux shell script that can copy a specified table or all tables in a remote MySQL database to Infobright.  It uses a standard SELECT statement making it engine-neutral.  If an entire database is specified, it retrieves a list of tables for the chosen database from MySQL and for each table, extracts the data into a temporary file and then loads that file into an existing Infobright table.  A record count from the original table is compared to the target table and displayed.  Currently this only supports a tab delimeter and tables to be copied must already exist on Infobright.

To assist in creating tables on Infobright, the SHOW CREATE TABLE statement on MySQL can be used to extract the CREATE TABLE statements and used in Infobright with minor edits.
Infobright welcomes your comments and suggestions on the quality and usefulness of ICE Breaker through our forums.  Both current ICE Breakers can be found on the Contributed Software Download page.