Hi everyone,
We are live on the Kinetic Cloud 2023.1.8 and still have our old Epicor 9 Progress database server running on a VM. I don’t want to have to monitor this VM forever and we kept it running for historical data that we did not bring forward to Epicor 11. Has anyone had any experience with movning their historical data off to an Access database or some other kind of platform so they can shut down their Progress software? Just looking for some ideas on what we should do to preserve our historical data.
The database is 226 GB as a whole. We don’t need all of that data saved off. Just some order entry, Customer and financial data.
We would not want to tie this saved off data into our current stuff for a query. We would run separate queries as we do now and combine them on an excel spreadsheet.
I agree with the saving of a backup or two or three and also the VM. I just have had bad experiences with Progress in the past when you shut it down for a while. It does not always want to start back up cleanly and I really don’t want to ever have to install that software again.
Our last database, which was a green screen database called Qantel, we saved the important historical data off to an Access database. We have had that running for over 10 years. Our Customer Service department still swear that they access it from time to time but I have yet to have them prove it to me:>)
Just thought someone might have some experience with saving their Progress data off to some other software so it can be easily accessible by our Sales, Customer Service and Finance departments.
I’d say that you find yourself an ODBC tool that will talk to the progress DB as well as a SQL db and do a data transfer. We did the same a decade ago and I can’t for the life of me remember the tool, but it worked well. Having that data in SQL will be better than Access for sure, and you might just want to bring that Access data in as well.
I did a quick google search and it looks like there is a lot more to work with then we had back then.
If it’s not too expensive, which it might not be since you want a limited slice of data, I’d just throw it in an Azure DB in the cloud. Then you can do whatever you want with it.
Epicor used to have a tool to convert Progress to SQL see if you can talk to your support / cam and then run that tool so you can get the Db in a SQL Format (like @MikeGross sugested)
Then you can store that anywhere even in Azure Cloud as @klincecum said, but I know Epicor had a converter program that might make it slightly less painful.
Actually looks like progress has a nice tool for it
Like @josecgomez said Epicor has a cloud conversion tool to uplift it to whatever you are on. You could use their tool, have them convert it to 2023.whatever and load that DB to your current SQL server and spin up an app server environment solely to view the info. Give access to trackers only… etc. Call it Epicor9Legacy or something. You don’t even have to worry about whether there are bugs or if you can enter more data cause as you said it’s just to view the data. You’ll still have ensure that the integrity of the data is good since you mentioned you want to reference the financials and other historical data, but if you follow their preconversion checklist it should come over just fine. Pretty sure they have a read only database option too for reporting purposes… no app server needed?
