Step-By-Step Guide to Importing Data from Oracle XE to SQL 2005

Introduction

In a previous step-by-step tutorial, I discussed how to install and work with Oracle's 10g based small-footprint express edition, Oracle XE for short. Specifically I showed how to work with one of the existing databases. It's quite an exhilarating experience to experiment with this fast, easy to use database that only requires modest resources but can store up to 4GB of user data (limited to one CPU on your machine). This is an excellent resource for those who want to play with the bigger versions; they can train on this one.

Enterprises always have more than one kind of data source involved in their business and at times they do need to move data from one to another, for archiving, creating user interface objects in a data bound application, some off-line simple analysis in their spread sheet applications, and so forth Data movement is also driven by software evolution. For example, an existing database program can only handle relational data, but the company is proactively looking at using XML as well. They need to move data to a platform that handles XML, preferably both XML and relational data.

This tutorial is more about SQL 2005 Server and less about Oracle XE. This tutorial guides the reader through the steps necessary to import data from Oracle XE into a SQL 2005 Server database. The tutorial will use the Import/Export wizard to bring a couple of tables from Oracle XE to a new database in SQL 2005 Server. The various steps are clearly delineated. The next picture shows the Object Browser in Oracle XE displaying the table list in the hr database. Tables enclosed in red rectangles will be brought into SQL 2005 Server.