1) I'm assuming that there's no issue with putting PostgreSQL on the
same Windows 2003 server as our current MSSQL during the migration?
(The box is not overloaded and I can't think of a reason not to do this.)
2) Looking at the case sensitivity issue. It seems like as long as the
identifiers in the database (table names, field names) are converted to
lowercase that PGSQL doesn't seem to care what case the SQL statement is
in. So we don't have to worry (as much) about the SQL statements being
produced by our current applications. (I've been looking at the various
MSSQL -> PostgreSQL conversion documents linked off of postgresql.org's
pages.)
3) Is there anything similar to Enterprise Manager's import/export wizard?
One nifty feature that EM has is that it made loading data from MSAccess
databases into SQLServer very easy (it would automatically create the
tables for us, we just had to assign keys/indexes by hand). We probably
used this feature half a dozen times per day as new jobs went into
production (they were tested locally in MSAccess databases for
simplicity). Or we could dump from SQL server into a blank MDB and get
tables created automatically, in a single step, without writing queries
for each table that needed to be exported.
Alternately, we could put up a testing PostgreSQL server and deal with
dump/restore. But MDBs had the advantage that we could stuff them into
a source code control system for easy versioning prior to loading into
production. And we prefer to dump data back out to MSAccess for after
the job goes back offline. (Every job has different table formats,
they're typically "one-of" designs. Once a job goes offline, there's no
need to keep the data around in a "live" state.)
