We are currently migrating a given database environment from an external provider on SQL Server 2005 to Oracle 11.2.0.3. While we could use GoldenGate, it is a one time migration for which we don’t need the “big iron” (or cost).
We found ApexSQL, which can be found at http://www.apexsql.com/sql_tools_log.aspx
This looks like pretty good software. It can be accessed via the GUI provided, or using an API to programatically strip the transactions out of the SQL Server transaction logs. For $1,999 per server ( a server is any computer on which SQL Server is installed, whether it is physical or virtual), you get a single unlimited client seat license to read the transaction logs as well as a lot of other cool stuff like automated auditing. We also have about 180 SQL Server databases, so this will be useful going forward for functionality similar to Oracle’s LogMiner technology.
We have a complete test case, but the GUI piece is pretty straightforward, so this is just a note as to how we compiled the command line API test case provided.
If you don’t have Visual Studio installed, ensure you have msbuild.exe installed by downloading the dotnet 4.0 developer build of Microsoft dotnet. The client version does not have msbuild.exe, which is required (or at least is very helpful) to compile C sharp projects.
Below is an example.
c:\>cd c:\Program Files (x86)\ApexSQL\ApexSQLLogAPI2011>
c:\Program Files (x86)\ApexSQL\ApexSQLLogAPI2011>C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe ApexSqlLogApiDemo.csproj
c:\Program Files (x86)\ApexSQL\ApexSQLLogAPI2011>cd bin/Debug
c:\Program Files (x86)\ApexSQL\ApexSQLLogAPI2011\bin\Debug>ApexSqlLogApiDemo.exe dad_laptop\home test
This will create a text file in the bin/Debug directory with all transactions in the log. You can filter these, so I will post more after we procure a license and “productionize” the extract.