Thread: Sybase to SQL Server 2005

Our municipal organization has a fare system for our buses that is built on a Sybase database. We can access it through Crystal Reports as well as their proprietary reporting software.

We're in the process of creating a data cube with our other transit data which is on SQL Server 2005. While the company that provides the fare software has a conversion from Sybase to SQL Server, they want about $50,000 for it.

We are not able to copy the database itself, but I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on this. The database is tiny compared to our other transit software (maybe 20-25 tables while there are almost 500 tables for our transit database). It seems that it should be fairly easy to import the data into something like Crystal reports then use insert queries into our SQL Server with predefined datatypes based on the data we receive from Sybase.

Have any of you ever worked with Sybase before? If so, do you think this is doable? Or are the syntaxes so different that we couldn't really determine the appropriate datatype conversions?

The idea isn't to do a one time conversion but to write a conversion tool that will work each time we import the data.

Thanks!

Hmmm..so do you think the data would need to stay in some kind of repository first so that it could be translated first?

I was looking at sybase data types and they don't seem terribly off from sql server...but my guess is that if you tried to import the data directly into sql server, it wouldn't know what to do with it.

We'll play around with it and I'll let you know what we come up with.

As always, thanks Jason!