Conor O’Mahony on migrating Oracle Database and DBA skills

Submitted by on May 30, 2012  |  2,738 views

Conor O’Mahony, Program Director in the IBM software group, discusses migrating from Oracle Database to IBM DB2 and how Oracle DBAs can use their skills against DB2.

  • Indianrepublican

    @Conor, how many PL/SQL packages have been ported to DB2 LUW? What’s the roadmap to support the rest? I guess you’re waiting for EnterpriseDB, from where DB2 LUW got the Oracle PL/SQL features, to deliver the features. I’m also interested in your thoughts on Oracle MVC support, the last I recall you could only go back to one change.

  • http://twitter.com/srielau Serge Rielau

    Let me first clarify that only a small fraction of the Oracle Application compatibility work has come from EnterpriseDB.
    This fraction did however include the 10 packages delivered in DB2 9.7.
    Since then a handful of packages have been made available to customers as-is upon request or on external wikis such as http://www.oracle2db2wiki.com,
    This includes packages such as DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO, DBMS_RANDOM and DBMS_STATS.
    Over time we plan to incorporate these packages and more into DB2.
    It is important to know that only a couple of dozen of the many packages are popular for Oracle Application development.
    So the actual gap is smaller than one might imagine.

    MvCC has shown to be a surprisingly small hurdle.
    “Currently committed” has been quite sufficient to customers making the jump.
    In the rare cases where MvCC semantics are truly required they tend to be isolated to specific tables.
    DB2 10′s Temporal data management capability is in these cases often a better match.