Thread: Convert Filemaker Pro db to Postgresql db
I've been reading through the lists but have not been able to find any information about how to take a Filemaker Pro database and convert it into a Postgresql database. Does anyone have any information on how to do this type of conversion? Thanks!
On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Scott Gritton wrote:
> I've been reading through the lists but have not been able to find any
> information about how to take a Filemaker Pro database and convert it into a
> Postgresql database.
> Does anyone have any information on how to do this type of conversion?
> Thanks!
(My suggestions are a bit speculative. I gave it a day to see if any real
FM users would respond; since none have, I hope this is better than
nothing... :-) )
It's been ~4 years since my fingers touched FileMaker Pro (I understand
it's much nicer now...).
Can FM generate DDL ('create table foo...') statements? If so, you can
dump your data that way.
In FM, can you access ODBC-linked tables? If so, you can copy the data
that way.
Or, do you have any scripting ability? You could write a
Perl/Python/PHP/P-whatever script to connect to FM and connect to PG. PG
has database connectors for all of these languages.
If you're stuck, perhaps it would help non-FM-users on the list for you to
give us a sense of what you can do w/your FM data.
HTH,
--
Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington
On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 12:47:17PM -0700, Scott Gritton wrote:
> I've been reading through the lists but have not been able to find any
> information about how to take a Filemaker Pro database and convert it into a
> Postgresql database.
> Does anyone have any information on how to do this type of conversion?
We did it by having a webmaster write a Frontier script to generate a
report formatted thusly:
INSERT INTO rawbugs (....) VALUES (...)
(where there is a fieldlist and data in the (), of course)
...then I just use pgsql -f <filename> to slurp it in, and spent an
afternoon dealing with the breakage (we had some greater-then-8k tuples
that I had to sort out).
Other options, as people have mentioned, would be ODBC, but we found
that this worked better. And that FileMaker sucks.
--
Adam Haberlach |
adam@newsnipple.com | http://youlook.org
http://www.newsnipple.com |
'88 EX500 '00 >^< |
Hi Joel,
I'm not a FM user so I actually don't know about its capabilities.
I've been given the assignment to convert our FM bug database over to
Postgresql and was hoping that there was a tool out 'there' that could
accomplish this without me having to spend a lot of time on the process of
conversion.
I'm just starting to script with Python and will be looking into how I might
be able to do the conversion that way if I can't find any easier way.
Thanks for your reply!
Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Burton [mailto:jburton@scw.org]
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 11:42 AM
To: Scott Gritton
Cc: 'pgsql-general@postgresql.org'
Subject: Re: Convert Filemaker Pro db to Postgresql db
On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, Scott Gritton wrote:
> I've been reading through the lists but have not been able to find any
> information about how to take a Filemaker Pro database and convert it into
a
> Postgresql database.
> Does anyone have any information on how to do this type of conversion?
> Thanks!
(My suggestions are a bit speculative. I gave it a day to see if any real
FM users would respond; since none have, I hope this is better than
nothing... :-) )
It's been ~4 years since my fingers touched FileMaker Pro (I understand
it's much nicer now...).
Can FM generate DDL ('create table foo...') statements? If so, you can
dump your data that way.
In FM, can you access ODBC-linked tables? If so, you can copy the data
that way.
Or, do you have any scripting ability? You could write a
Perl/Python/PHP/P-whatever script to connect to FM and connect to PG. PG
has database connectors for all of these languages.
If you're stuck, perhaps it would help non-FM-users on the list for you to
give us a sense of what you can do w/your FM data.
HTH,
--
Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington
On Monday 09 April 2001 10:49 am, Scott Gritton wrote: > Hi Joel, > I'm not a FM user so I actually don't know about its capabilities. > I've been given the assignment to convert our FM bug database over to > Postgresql and was hoping that there was a tool out 'there' that could > accomplish this without me having to spend a lot of time on the process of > conversion. > I'm just starting to script with Python and will be looking into how I > might be able to do the conversion that way if I can't find any easier way. > Thanks for your reply! There are basically 4 aspects to a FM database to think about: 1) Field definintions 2) The data 3) User Interface 4) Scripts for functionality Being both a FM and Postgres user, I'm familiar with how both work, although I've not yet tried to convert a FM database into postgres, because I invariably use them for different things. Obviously, the UI is toast, kiss it goodbye. As are the scripts - FM scripting language is very idiosyncratic, and doesn't really correspond well to anything much else out there. It also directly depends on the UI - which you've had to kiss goodbye. There is no automated way that I know of to generate pg tables based on FM field definitions. FM does export to .dbf format, so that if there are ways to convert .dbf files to SQL, that's one way to go. Otherwise, I think its a manual task. In terms of the data - writing a perl or python script to import data exported (in delimited form) from FM to pg is certainly not to hard a task (I have a perl script that I've used, if anyone wants it.) Hope this is helpful. Michelle ------------ Michelle Murrain, Ph.D. President Norwottuck Technology Resources mpm@norwottuck.com http://www.norwottuck.com