Migration of SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) 2017 database to Microsoft SQL Server 2022

Question

Dear Forum,

We kindly request your assistance in providing guidance on establishing a standard migration strategy for transitioning from SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) 2017 database to SQL Server 2022. It has come to our understanding that migrating from ASA 2017 to ASE (Enterprise) version is a necessary step for a complete migration to SQL Server 2022. Therefore, we would appreciate your suggestions on whether SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) can facilitate the migration process from the Sybase database to SQL Server.

Furthermore, our application has been developed using Delphi 10.4 with the Borland Database Adapter. We would like to know if the current version of the adapter is compatible with SQL Server 2022 or if it needs to be upgraded to a supported version.

We greatly value your prompt response and assistance regarding these matters.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this request.

Regards

Arun Siripuram

Answer 1

You are correct SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) supports migrations from Sybase ASE but does not support migration from Sybase Anywhere (ASA). If you try to use SSMA to connect to Sybase ASA you may get the following ODBC driver error:

You will have to migrate from ASA to ASE as explained here, to be able to use SSMA. Once the database has been migrated to Sybase ASE you can use SSMA to migrate to SQL Server, and the overall process is explained here.

Please download this old Migration guide on PDF format, that I am sure you will find very useful.

If your databases use binary collations, you may find query results are different on SQL Server compared to Sybase where ORDER BY clause is used. In that case, you can use the collation Latin1_General_BIN2 as the SQL server default collation or use the specify collation for the ORDER clause.

SELECT * FROM Table1 ORDER BY Column1 COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN2

Finally, your Delphi application may use ADO to connect to SQL Server. I tried to provide you a an example but the Editor did not allow me to share that with you.

Answer 2

@Alberto Morillo

i am reaching out to gather your insights and recommendations regarding potential software tools (open source or licensed) for streamlining the migration process from Sybase Anywhere (ASA) to Sybase ASE. Our main aim is to boost operational efficiency by making the migration quicker and reducing the need for time-consuming manual procedures.

Furthermore, could you kindly provide clarification on whether the FIREDAC adapter (apart from ADO) would be a suitable choice for establishing communication between Delphi code and SQL Server?

Your valuable input would mean a lot to us and play a crucial role in helping us achieve our migration goals.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Please clarify

Answer 3

Let me share the Ispirer Toolkit with you. Ispirer can convert the entire database schema, data, and business logic. You can try a free demo on the URL I shared with you.

About FireDac, yes you can use it to connect to Microsoft SQL Server from Delphi. FireDAC provides a native driver for Microsoft SQL Server that allows you to work with SQL Server databases using TFDConnection and TFDQuery components. You can configure the connection to SQL Server at design-time or run-time, and use various connection parameters to customize the connection behavior. You can also use FireDAC to execute SQL commands, retrieve scalar values, and create master-details relationships between datasets. The only thing about FireDac is the fact about community edition and professional edition only able to make local connections to SQL Server as you can see here. This article shows you how to connect to SQL Server using FireDac and Delphi.

Thank you for visiting Microsoft QA again for your project needs. You are always welcome here.