Migratool: Towards a Web-Based Spatial Database Migration Tool Fábio Luiz Leite Jr., André Gomes de Sousa, Cláudio de Souza Baptista, Camilo Porto Nunes, Elvis Rodrigues da Silva, Damião Ribeiro de Almeida UFCG— Federal University of Campina Grande, Computer Science Department Rua Aprígio Veloso, 882, 58107-970, Campina Grande - PB, Brazil {fabio, andre, baptista, nunes, elvis, damiao}@dsc.ufcg.edu.br Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva UFMA- Federal University of Maranhão, Informatics Department Av. dos Portugueses, SN, Campus do Bacanga, 65085-580, São Luis- MA, Brazil paiva@deinf.ufma.br Abstract The plethora of different GIS solutions has brought a new challenge: how to provide transportability among heterogeneous data sources with minimal impact on IT, reducing costs and time? The advent of open software is pushing this issue for using universal spatial-aware standards such as GML. This paper presents a software tool known as Migratool, which aims to easy the geospatial data migration among both distributed and heterogeneous data sources. This tool is based on a three tiers architecture and it has been implemented using the J2EE architecture. 1. Introduction Interoperability is a key aspect nowadays as heterogeneous information systems, using proprietary formats need to cooperate [1,2]. Hence, interoperability of Geographical Information Systems has also been deeply discussed [3,4]. The demand for spatial data migration among heterogeneous Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has increased recently [5]. Many migration tools from either GIS makers or third part solutions have been commercialized. It is very common a GIS to read data from different formats. Besides proprietary formats, platform independent ones have been proposed, such as SDTS[6] and SAIF [7], which aim to provide a neutral and platform independent format to enable data portability among GIS applications. More recently, OpenGIS has proposed the GML format which is based on XML and is able to represent data with spatial and temporal footprints [8]. On the other hand, several database management systems have provided support for spatial data including Oracle Spatial, IBM DB2 Spatial Extender, Postgis/Postgresql and more recently MySQL. Moreover there are many open source geospatial tools such as Geotools, Geoserver, Grass, and Deegree, which make use of these database systems. Therefore, this variety of GIS solutions has demanded new approaches for spatial data migration, especially those stored on spatial database systems. In this work we focus on the migration of spatial data stored in heterogeneous database management systems. For the best of our knowledge there is no such solution in the market. In this paper we present Migratool which aims to manage spatial data migration among spatial database systems. Migratool has been designed from real demand: a GIS project for hydrographic resources in the Northeast of Brazil. In this project, we had the necessity to migrate several times more than one million of tuples containing spatial geometries from an Oracle database system to a Postgresql one and vice- versa. After building Migratool this tedious, highly time consuming, and error prone migration procedure could be done rapidly and safely. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related works. Section 3 presents the overall Migratool architecture. Section 4 focuses on implementation issues. Section 5 presents an example of Migratool usage. Finally, section 6 concludes this paper and highlights further work to be undertaken. Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA’05) 1529-4188/05 $20.00 © 2005 IEEE