PGConf.SPB 2023

A story about practical approaches and tools for automating migration using 2 examples: a database with a structure change in the new version and a database with a significant content of the application's business logic.

Postgres Pro is investing heavily to make it easy for customers to migrate to their database from Oracle Database.

This talk describes in detail the advanced Postgres Pro DBMS technologies designed to solve this problem:

• support for package functionality in PL/pgSQL, including the package initialization section and global package variables;
• ora2pgrpo utility for automatic conversion of package code from Oracle PL/SQL syntax to PL/pgSQL;
• PG Pro Application Info extension designed for instrumentation and monitoring of the state of sessions, including the execution of long operations (session longops) - a functional analogue of the package DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO in Oracle DBMS;
• new system packages UTL_MAIL and UTL_SMTP for sending emails from stored procedures to Postgres Pro DBMS (full functional analogue of the corresponding packages in Oracle DBMS);
• new system package UTL_HTTP for interacting with external sources from stored procedures in Postgres Pro DBMS (analogous to the package of the same name in Oracle DBMS);

Also in this talk there will be a short story about the directions of development of the Postgres Pro DBMS aimed at further simplifying migration from Oracle DBMS.

Unfortunately, ideal computer systems exist only in science fiction books. PostgreSQL is not exception and sometimes problems may occur. I would like to discuss how to correctly (and incorrectly) try to solve a problem, which way to choose, which tool to use.

The talk is of interest to both beginners and experienced users and database administrators.

We'll talk about the tool we created, which monitors changes in the database and creates scripts for migrations of selected objects both interactively and automatically.