Beginning Oracle® Application Express

12.2. Migrating Your Applications

With that brief overview of the reasons behind migration, it's time to jump into the migration process itself.

This chapter will focus on migration of Microsoft Access databases and applications, for three reasons. First, Access is one of the most popular database application development tools in the world, and yet it still has some limitations in terms of scalability and robustness that might prompt users to look for alternatives. The second reason is that Access combines both a database and an application development and deployment environment, much like the combination of Oracle APEX and the Oracle database. The third reason is that Oracle has provided a pretty rich set of tools specifically aimed at migrating Access applications to the APEX stack.

However, the steps and tools used for this migration could also be employed for moving data structures and data from other databases. Your methods might differ from other databases, such as targeting moving the data structures and data and developing applications quickly from scratch with APEX, rather than migrating applications themselves.

The remainder of this chapter will focus on presenting a high-level overview of the process of migrating a typical Microsoft Access application. You can get more details on migration from Access in general in an excellent paper on migration on the Apex web site, as well as the chapter on migration in the Oracle Application Express Application Migration Guide