IBM Migration Toolkit

The IBM Migration Toolkit (MTK) is a tool that helps you migrate your databases from other relational database management systems to DB2. The tool can be downloaded and used free of charge from this site.

Figure 1 illustrates the MTK steps which are presented in the tool as tabs.

Figure 1 - Migration Toolkit Steps

Specify Source
In this step, you can provide the MTK the DDL files you extracted from your source database (say Oracle for this example). You can also have the MTK connect to Oracle and perform the extraction for you. It is recommended to perform migrations of objects one step at a time. For example, you can start with the migration of tables, then stored procedures, then triggers, and so on.
Convert
In this step, you click the "convert" button and allow the MTK engine to perform the migration. The MTK will report the items it was successful to convert, and the ones that may need your attention.

Refine
This is the step where the user analyzes what the MTK has reported as problem items. You need to review each item and make a decision. For example, in Oracle a column that is part of a primary key can allow nulls. In DB2 this is not allowed. If you change this column so that it no longer allows nulls, how will this affect your application?

After making adjustments, you can try the "Convert" button again. Repeat this process until you have a clean migration of all objects.

Generate Data Transfer Scripts
This step creates scripts that will allow the transfer of data from your source database (say Oracle) to your target database (DB2). The scripts will not be executed in this step, they are only created.

Deploy to DB2
This step creates a DB2 database, and runs the scripts to create the DB2 objects that were migrated. It then proceeds (if you chose this option) to run the scripts for data transfer.

After the database migration is performed, test your application against the new DB2 database. If your application has followed standards such as JDBC or ODBC, there is likely none or minor changes needed.

For further details, please review the DB2 Migrate Now! web site.