Is there any good way to migrate existing database from Domino Server to Relational database like MySQL without using any tool.
I've explored a bit about this and got to know that its possible using XML but don't know how and what'll be the procedure.
Any help would be appreciated.
Without using any tool: NO.
There are two big difficulties in exporting data:
First is the Notes Richtext, which is a proprietary format that has to be "transcoded" somehow. This is not an easy thing to do "manually" and needs either a lot of coding or some kind of tool.
Second is the fact, that there is no "forced" structure in Notes documents. There can be several forms that "define" how the documents look and there can be different versions of these forms that have been used over the past. A document may or may not contain any number of fields in any thinkable type (the field may even be number in one document and text in the other).
You have to KNOW the structure of your documents to get them out. Of course you can simply export them as "Structured Text" or as "Comma separated values", to get -most- of it, but then you need views that show the documents in the order you need them. Exporting them as XML is another "standard" way to get the data, but then you need to understand the xml to get it into your relational database.
Short: Without (at least very little) coding knowledge OR a tool (that costs money) there is no chance for getting the data out.
Ah yes, there is an "ODBC driver" for Lotus Notes / Domino, but that will not help you much, if you do not know the structure of your documents and how Notes- Databases work, it will also not work.
As Torsten said above, you can't do it without a tool, either you buy one or write one yourself.
I wrote a tool like that several years ago to export Notes databases as XML. There is a bit of work, especially with the rich text fields. You also may want to export/detach attachments and embedded images.
You can read more about my export tool here: http://www.texasswede.com/websites/texasswede.nsf/Page/Notes%20XML%20Exporter
Related
I want to build an application that uses data from several endpoints.
Lets say I have:
JSON API for getting cinema data
XML Export for getting data about ???
Another JSON API for something else
A csv-file for some more shit ...
In my application I want to bring all this data together and build views for it and so on ...
MY idea was to set up a database by create schemas for all these data sources, so I can do some kind of "import scripts" which I can call whenever I want to get the latest data.
I thought of schemas because I want to be able to easily adept a new API with any kind of schema.
Please enlighten me of the possibilities and best practices out there (theory and practice if possible :P)
You are totally right on making a database. But the real problem is probably not going to be how to store your data. It's going to be how to make it fit together logically and semantically.
I suggest you first take a good look at what your enpoints can provide. Get several samples from every source and analyze them if you can. How will you know which data is new? How can you match it against existing data and against data from other sources? If existing data changes or gets deleted, how will you detect and handle that? What if sources disagree on something? How and when should you run the synchronization? What will you do if one of your sources goes down? Etc.
It is extremely difficult to make data consistent if your data sources are not. As a rule, if the sources are different, they are not consistent. Thus the proverb "garbage in, garbage out". We, humans, have no problem dealing with small inconsistencies, but algorithms cannot work correctly if there are discrepancies. Even if everything fits together on paper, one usually forgets that data can change over time...
At least that's my experience in such cases.
I'm not sure if in the application you want to display all the data in the same view or if you are going to be creating different views for each of the sources. If you want to display the data in the same view, like a grid, I would recommend using inheritance or an interface depending on your data and needs. I would recommend setting this structure up in the database too using different tables for the different sources and having a parent table related to all them that has a type associated with it.
Here's a good thread with discussion about choosing an interface or inheritance.
Inheritance vs. interface in C#
And here are some examples of representing inheritance in a database.
How can you represent inheritance in a database?
I have a few XML files containing data for a research project which I need to run some statistics on. The amount of data is close to 100GB.
The structure is not so complex (could be mapped to perhaps 10 tables in a relational model), and given the nature of the problem, this data will never be updated again, I only need it available in a place where it's easy to run queries on.
I've read about XML databases, and the possibility of running XPATH-style queries on it, but I never used them and I'm not so comfortable with it. Having the data in a relational database would be my preferred choice.
So, I'm looking for a way to covert the data stored in XML into a relational database (think of a big .sql file similar to the one generated by mysqldump, but anything else would do).
The ultimate goal is to be able to run SQL queries for crunching the data.
After some research I'm almost convinced I have to write it on my own.
But I feel this is a common problem, and therefore there should be a tool which already does that.
So, do you know of any tool that would transform XML data into a relational database?
PS1:
My idea would be something like (it can work differently, but just to make sure you get my point):
Analyse the data structure (based on the XML themselves, or on a XSD)
Build the relational database (tables, keys) based on that structure
Generate SQL statements to create the database
Generate SQL statements to create fill in the data
PS2:
I've seen some posts here in SO but still I couldn't find a solution.
Microsoft's "Xml Bulk Load" tool seems to do something in that direction, but I don't have a MS SQL Server.
Databases are not the only way to search data. I can highly recommend Apache Solr
Strategies to Implement search on XML file
Keep your raw data as XML and search it using the Solr index
Importing XML files of the right format into a MySql database is easy:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/load-xml.html
This means, you typically have to transform your XML data into that kind of format. How you do this depends on the complexity of the transformation, what programming languages you know, and if you want to use XSLT (which is most probably a good idea).
From your former answers it seems you know Python, so http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/python.html may be the right thing for you to start with.
Take a look at StAX instead of XSD for analyzing/extraction of data. It's stream based and can deal with huge XML files.
If you feel comfortable with Perl, I've had pretty good luck with XML::Twig module for processing really big XML files.
Basically, all you need is to setup few twig handlers and import your data into MySQL using DBI/DBD::mysql.
There is pretty good example on xmltwig.org.
If you comfortable with commercial products, you might want to have a look at Data Wizard for MySQL by the SQL Maestro Group.
This application is targeted especially at exporting and, of course, importing data from/ to MySQL databases. This also includes XML import. You can download a 30-day trial to check if this is what you are looking for.
I have to admit that I did not use the MySQL product line from them yet, but I had a good user experience with their Firebird Maestro and SQLite Maestro products.
My boss is asking me to find an easy way for the engineers to type in descriptions of entities and fields of a large database (sql server 2008) and I am struggling to understand his requirement. He mentioned there is a way of doing so by "directly inputting descriptions in the schema files in a specific syntax that other software can easily pull out to generate a data dictionary".
He said this is what he did 7 / 8 years ago and it was very easy
I looked on the web, and I showed him how you can use SQL statements to edit the external properties of entities and fields, to which he said it was not what he wanted and that "this is not a convenient or fast way" of doing so.
Does any one know what my boss is talking about? And maybe explain to me what sort of schema file he is talking about?
I don't know of any way that has ever existed for SQL Server other than sp_addextendedproperty when it comes to schema definition. In Enterprise Manager, it used to be a little more obvious how to enter in descriptions. In Management Studio, it's really non obvious. You can do it a little easier if you create a database diagram, then edit the custom view of the tables and add the description column to the view. You could also use a tool like http://www.sqldatadictionary.com to quickly edit many descriptions.
I have a commercial ColdFusion application, running on a MySQL database. A possible new client has approached me, they have been working in a Lotus Notes environment (and their own database) for many years now. Ofcourse they want to migrate their data to my application, before making the move.
I'm trying to get a grip on how to get a thorough feeling of the data, structure and interdependencies in their current database-application. Are there any tools to see a database-structure (like in a RDBMS) of a NSF-file, or is there anyway to dump the structure using ColdFusion etc....I don't have any handson experience with Lotus Notes (I do in the meanwhile have a local Lotus client and their database).
I need a good startingpoint to be able to determine whether or not I can find a way to migrate the data.
Any ideas??
thanks
Bart
To get at the data in Notes, a good option is to use NotesSQL which can be found here:
A quick overview of the Notes data structure is this: Notes is a document-centric database, with non-relational data contained within each document. Notes Databases (NSFs) contain any number of Notes Documents, which in turn contain any number of items that hold data. Each Notes Document can have a different set of items, and thus different data in it. While that sounds like a horrible mess, usually the documents have similar data based on the form used to create the documents.
This all leads to why there is no simple way to get data out of Lotus Notes. There are a few other options, which may or may not be useful depending on how much data you have to migrate.
I personally like using XML to extract data from Lotus Notes. You can do so by creating XML views within a Notes database. IBM has a tutorial that looks helpful.
Using Java or LotusScript, you can write code to extract data from the documents to any format you wish (CSV, XML, TXT, etc)
If it's not a lot of data, you may find getting the data into an Excel format is the simplest intermediary step. Long ago I wrote an add-in tool for exporting data from Lotus Notes to Excel, which may help you. Or you can use the "Edit > Copy Selected To Table" feature in the Lotus Notes client to copy what is visible in a Notes View to the clipboard, and then paste that into Excel. In that scenario, you'd want to edit the views so they show all the data you need.
I hope this helps!
I'd love to do this:
UPDATE table SET blobCol = HTTPGET(urlCol) WHERE whatever LIMIT n;
Is there code available to do this? I known this should be possible as the MySQL Docs include an example of adding a function that does a DNS lookup.
MySQL / windows / Preferably without having to compile stuff, but I can.
(If you haven't heard of anything like this but you would expect that you would have if it did exist, A "proly not" would be nice.)
EDIT: I known this would open a whole can-o-worms re security, however in my cases, the only access to the DB is via the mysql console app. Its is not a world accessible system. It is not a web back end. It is only a local data logging system
No, thank goodness — it would be a security horror. Every SQL injection hole in an application could be leveraged to start spamming connections to attack other sites.
You could, I suppose, write it in C and compile it as a UDF. But I don't think it really gets you anything in comparison to just SELECTing in your application layer and looping over the results doing HTTP GETs and UPDATEing. If we're talking about making HTTP connections, the extra efficiency of doing it in the database layer will be completely dwarfed by the network delays anyway.
I don't know of any function like that as part of MySQL.
Are you just trying to retreive HTML data from many URLs?
An alternative solution might be to use Google spreadsheet's importHtml function.
Google Spreadsheets Lets You Import Online Data
Proly not. Best practises in a web-enviroment is to have database-servers isolated from the outside, both ways, meaning that the db-server wouldn't be allowed to fetch stuff from the internet.
Proly not.
If you're absolutely determined to get web content from within an SQL environ, there are as far as I know two possibilities:
Write a custom MySQL UDF in C (as bobince mentioned). The could potentially be a huge job, depending on your experience of C, how much security you want, how complete you want the UDF to be: eg. Just GET requests? How about POST? HEAD? etc.
Use a different database which can do this. If you're happy with SQL you could probably do this with PostgreSQL and one of the snap-in languages such as Python or PHP.
If you're not too fussed about sticking with SQL you could use something like eXist. You can do this type of thing relatively easily with XQuery, and would benefit from being able to easily modify the results to fit your schema (rather than just lumping it into a blob field) or store the page "as is" as an xhtml doc in the DB.
Then you can run queries very quickly across all documents to, for instance, get all the links or quotes or whatever. You could even apply XSL to such a result with very little extra work. Great if you're storing the pages for reference and want to adapt the results into a personal "intranet"-style app.
Also since eXist is document-centric it has lots of great methods for fuzzy-text searching, near-word searching, and has a great full-text index (much better than MySQL's). Perfect if you're after doing some data-mining on the content, eg: find me all documents where a word like "burger" within 50 words of "hotdog" where the word isn't in a UL list. Try doing that native in MySQL!
As an aside, and with no malice intended; I often wonder why eXist is over-looked when people build CMSs. Its a database that can store content in its native format (XML, or its subset (x)HTML), query it with ease in its native format, and can translate it from its native format with a powerful templating language which looks and acts like its native format. Sometimes SQL is just plain wrong for the job!
Sorry. Didn't mean to waffle! :-$