Conversion of Access database to Interbase using Full Convert

Purpose of this tutorial is to show you basic use of Full Convert. To learn about advanced features such as built-in scheduler, data type customization, project customization rules, logging etc., take a look at the video tutorials.

The conversion using Full Convert is easy and you need to do just a few quick steps:

1. Connect to your source and target database
2. Deselect tables you wish to exclude from conversion
3. Start the conversion
4. Take a look at your brand new data in the target database, using a built-in database explorer
   

1. Connecting to databases

As we start Full Convert, you will notice a welcome panel with links for common tasks.
Let's create new conversion session. Click on the Create new conversion link, or click on the New button on the ribbon above.


Selecting source database
We will choose Access database from the list of available source database formats and fill in connection properties. You can simply click ellipsis (...) button to select MDB or ACCDB database file. It depends on the version of your database. Access 2007 databases are contained in ACCDB files, while earlier versions are contained in MDB files. If your Access database is protected, fill-in your password as well. In case you use Access workgroups and security, you will need to also find your system database and specify username/password for it.

Selecting target database
From the list of available target database engines, we'll choose Interbase/Firebird. As Firebird is derived from Interbase code base, they are largely compatible. That's why we use the same connection info for both Interbase and Firebird. In the server field we need to type the name or IP address of the Interbase server. If you have Interbase installed on the local machine, where Full Convert is running, you can leave the server field blank. Username and password we don't need to touch in most cases as Full Convert pre-fills the "magic" values which open all Interbase databases. If Interbase is on your local machine, we can now simply click ellipsis (...) button to select GDB or IB database file (file extension depends on the version of Interbase). If the file is on remote machine, you need to type the path to the file as remote server sees it. So, if the file is in C:\t\ folder on your server, you need to write the full path, for example: C:\t\filename.GDB.

2. Selecting tables to convert. All by default.

We will now select tables for conversion. Please note that you can count rows of tables to easily see where data actually resides. Clicking Unselect empty moves all empty tables to Do not convert list.


Clicking Next button brings us to the last page in the wizard, the summary. By default, I want to convert immediately option is selected. We will just leave this on to start right away. Otherwise, you can also choose to only explore target database at this point (as Full Convert has full-fledged database/data explorer built-in) and simply press Convert! button in ribbon when ready.

3. Conversion

Full Convert is very fast. We use dedicated native database components instead of relying on translation libraries like ODBC which incur performance hit and often have bugs of their own. Reaching transfer of 20.000 records per second is not uncommon. Of course, that speed can't be reached with slow databases (like Access, for example), when large binary data is in table, or when network lag is an issue.

Detailed summary

After conversion is finished, you will be presented with a summary. If errors occur, you will be able to inspect then in a separate tab. If appropriate, we will provide you with suggestions of how to further speed up transfer or avoid errors in conversion. Also, you can choose to have SQL commands displayed, so you can explore the generated SQL script and save it for use in your other database tools.
Have you noticed that we migrated 700k records in less than a minute? By the way, Full Convert handles databases of unlimited size!

Navigating the target database

Navigating structure tree shows us what the target database looks like now. You are free to do further modifications on structure, rename columns or change their type, drop obsolete columns, extract part of a table to new table etc.
You can also explore the data of each table, edit the data directly in the powerful grid, import/export cell values from/to disk and more.


That's all for this basic tutorial. Full Convert is very powerful - it's very easy to use, but offers much more than presented here.
We invite you to explore Full Convert more, and, of course, to purchase it. If you want to test it yourself, just download a free trial.



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