Migrating from PROGRESS to SQL Server 2008 - how?

I'm faced with a task I don't know how to proceed with: migrate a 120 GB database from PROGRESS to SQL Server 2008.

I've quite frankly never even heard of PROGRESS and can't really make much sense of their web site either.... what I have is a folder restore with 128 files called dbqsXXX where XXX goes from 1 through 128 - each file is 1 GB in size.

I don't know PROGRESS, I don't have any PROGRESS server available - is there any hope I can get the data out of these files into SQL Server??

Also: I tried to find ODBC drivers, and I found one (called SequeLink ODBC 4.51), but I cannot install it since it doesn't like my Win开发者_Python百科7 x64 machine :-( And on the PROGRESS site itself, I cannot seem to find any ODBC driver for download - only stuff that will cost $$$$$$

So - what are my options??

• is there something like a "PROGRESS Express" or "Free" or "Developer" version available?
• can I access those dbqs files in my "restore" directory some other way?? They appear to be at least partly binary - no CSV or XML or anything like that.....
• can I find a useable ODBC or OleDB driver that will work on my Win7 x64 machine and allow me to create a linked server to the PROGRESS db?? (worked fine with MySQL a while ago)
• can I (or my customer) somehow dump the structure and data from PROGRESS into another, more approachable format, like MySQL or PostgreSQL or something??

Any hints, tips, website, webcasts are most welcome !!

There is an evaluation kit available: http://communities.progress.com/pcom/docs/DOC-103695

This may, or may not, help you depending on what those files that you have actually are. If they are a complete and uncorrupted copy of a recent version of the database then the evaluation kit should be able to open them.

It is, however, possible that the database has been protected from such access. In which case you could be out of luck unless you can obtain credentials from whoever controls them.

Having said that -- your description of the file names does not sound like an actual database. Database extents are usually named something like dbname.db, dbname.b1, dbname.d1, dbname.d2 etc. If the db was configured using storage areas many of the extents will be named dbname_##.d#.

Your files sound more like they are "backup extents". In other words they are the result of someone making a backup and writing it in 1GB chunks. To restore such a backup you need a text file that lists all of these "extents" except for the first one. You would then execute the following:

prorest dbname extent1 < filelist

(Use the "proenv" shortcut to get a properly configured command window.)

Once you do that you would have an actual database. (If the backup was made with compresssion the restored db is likely to be a lot bigger than your files.)

Prorest is not backwards compatible. So if the backup is a v9 database the v10 evaluation kit won't work. You would need to find a machine with the same version of Progress that the backup was made with. (There are v9 utilities in the %DLC%\bin\91dbutils folder. Ditto v8 in 83dbutils. In theory you could use those to restore a backup of an old version and upgrade to a current version. Actually using those utilities is "challenging".)

Given an actual database you can then start a server with "proserve", connect to it and have fun. But right now isn't clear if there's any point to getting into the details of doing that.