Capturing the Source Database

Before migrating a third-party database, you must extract information from the database. This information is a representation of the structure of the source database, and it is called the captured model. The process of extracting the information from the database is called capturing the source database.

The capture can be done online or offline:

After capturing the source database, you can view the source database information in the captured model in SQL Developer. If necessary, you can modify the captured model and change data type mappings.


Note:

Oracle recommends that you do not change the default data type mappings unless you are an experienced Oracle database administrator.

Related Topics

Migrating Third-Party Databases

Online Capture

To perform an online capture of the source database, you can have the capture performed automatically as part of the Quick Migrate option, or you can have it performed as a separate operation by right-clicking the connection name in the Connections navigator and selecting Capture product-name (for example, Capture MySQL, Capture Microsoft Access, Capture Microsoft SQL Server, or Capture Sybase Adaptive Server).

For a Microsoft Access database, selecting Capture product-name automatically invokes the Microsoft Access exporter tool to create XML files for migrating the schema and the table data. However, if you want to run the exporter tool manually (for example, to control certain options), click Migration, then Microsoft Access Exporter, then the item for your version of Microsoft Access. Follow the steps for the exporter tool, which has its own online help.

Offline Capture

To perform an offline capture of a MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or Sybase Adaptive Server database, you create a set of offline capture scripts, run these scripts outside SQL Developer to create the script output (a dump of the third party metadata tables), and load the script output (the .ocp file containing the converted model) using SQL Developer.