Are you planning to merge your two Maximo systems into a single database? If so, that's honestly more significant than the database conversion aspect. There are many tables in Maximo that are at a system level, such as reports, screens, person & user records, SRs, etc. And there are some that can be at a system level like job plans. If you try to merge them into the same organization that list grows significantly (item, labor, companies, contracts, masterpm, etc.). This requires a lot of analysis of conflicts and the appropriate way to address. For example, if you have a conflict on person you have to determine if these two people are the same (and thus you need to merge the data from the systems) or do they represent different people and you need to now remap all references to this person across all tables in the system as part of your load.
There are also a variety of settings at a system level such as system properties, certain MAXVAR settings such as whether job plans utilize revision or not, etc. These would have to be analyzed and decided upon if they have different configurations.
If you're utilizing the same infrastructure but keeping them as two separate databases then your potential issues goes significantly down. And because you're going from SQL Server (which is typically configured as case insensitive for Maximo deployments) to DB2 (which is case sensitive), you're less likely to hit issue than the reverse. Some customers take advantage of the case sensitive aspect of DB2 and have had multiple values (such as two otherwise identical email addresses with different cases) that would be an issue loading into a case insensitive database.
As for how you get the DB2 database, some customers prefer going through a MAXINST (creating a blank database with the out of the box schema) and migrating all their changes from the original system. This is what we would typically call a reimplementation because it gives customers an opportunity to fix things they didn't like in their old system. Some actually try to go through the conversion of their database and address issues that occur with that process. Either approach you will still need to review and modify the Maximo configuration, such as saved queries, relationships, KPIs, reports, system properties (such as mxe.db.systemdateformat where we track which function to call on that database platform), etc.
There are people who have done this but you're not going to find any public documentation on it really. Database conversions, merges, etc. typically are done as professional services engagements so it's not something people can share unfortunately. Unless you're really knowledgeable on both Maximo and the underlying database platforms, I would consider engaging outside resources on something like this. There are some business partners who do this routinely and have tooling to make these transitions smoother.
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Steven Shull
IBM
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-31-2022 07:54
From: Chavdar Cholev
Subject: Maximo DB migration from MS SQL to IBM DB2
Hello,
we are in the process of consolidating two IBM Maximo installation into one.
Let say Maximo1 is on MS SQL DB, Maximo2 is on IBM DB2. Target is to create new Maximo infrastructure that will use IBM DB2 on Linux, and to transfer/migrate data from Maximo 1 and Maximo 2 to new infrastructure. I found on Redbook - "Microsoft SQL Server to IBM DB2 UDB Conversion Guide" where some aspects are discussed, but it is quite old. I was wondering if someone is performed such migration and if possible to share experience and guidelines.
Thank you in advance!
Chavdar
#Administration
#Infrastructure
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Chavdar Cholev
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