Introduction
I needed to convert the existing SQL server databases to SQLite databases as part of a DB migration program and did not find any decent free converter to do the job.
This is my attempt to solve the problem. I should warn you though that I did not have much time to test it on too many databases. In any case - the source code is very well documented and easy to understand, so if you do have a problem it should be relatively easy to fix. (Please send me the fixed source code. If you do so, I can update the software so that everybody can enjoy it.)
Using the Code
The code is split between a dataaccess project (class library) that contains the conversion code itself and a converter project (WinForms) that drives the conversion code and provides a simple UI for user interaction.
The main class that performs the conversion is the sqlservertosqlite
class. It does the conversion by doing the following steps:
- Reading the designated SQL server schema and preparing a list of
tableschema
objects that contain the schema for each and every SQL server table (and associated structures like indexes). - Preparing an empty sqlite database file with the schema that was read from SQL server. In this step, the code may alter few SQL-server types that are not supported directly in sqlite.
- Copying rows for each table from the SQL server database to the sqlite database.
Basically, that's it!
Points of Interest
In order to read the SQL server DB schema, I was mainly using the pseudo information_schema.table
table. You can find more information about it on the Internet if you want.
History
- 13th June, 2008: Initial version
- 08th July, 2008: v 1.2
- Fixed a bug that caused unique indexes to be generated as non-unique in some cases
- 08th July, 2008: v 1.3
- Fixed a bug that caused the utility to crash sometimes when processing index information
- 17th July, 2008: v 1.4
- Fixed a bug that caused wrong columns to become primary keys on rare occasions and improved conversion performance
- 20th July, 2008: v 1.5
- Added support for case-insensitive columns (
COLLATE NOCASE
)
- 22nd July, 2008: v 1.6
- Added support for encrypting the resulting DB file (using the built-in encryption support that exists in the SQLite .NET provider)
- 05th October, 2008: v 1.7
- Fixed
information_schema
references to use UPPER-CASE in order to resolve international character set issues (Turkish)
- 14th December 2008: v1.8
- Integrated support for foreign keys from the revised version made by Yogesh Jagota
- Merged support for selective table import
- 21st February 2009: v1.9
- Added contribution from johnny dickson cano that allows to select using SQL server integrated security or using user name /password instead
- Added support for converting
IDENTITY
columns to AUTOINCREMENT
in SQLite (suggestion by Paul Shaffer)
- 04th March 2009: v1.10
- Fixed a bug that caused the converter to crash when encountering a datetime field in the original SQL server schema. Thanks to bmcclint for sending me the bug with the correct bugfix.
- 23rd May 2009: v1.11
- Added support for simulating foreign keys using triggers (contributed by Martijn Muurman)
- Added a small bugfix so that now an '
int
' type is always converted to 'integer
' type in sqlite. This was needed because sqlite will autoincrement only on 'integer
' column types.
- 04th June 2009: v1.12
- Fixed a bug in trigger generation code that caused schema generation to fail when more than a single column is referencing the same column in a foreign table
- 20th September 2009: v1.13
- Fixed
AUTOINCREMENT
bug suggested by MAEP - Fixed 64 bit support problem (thanks to Murry Gammash)
- Added support for converting SQL Server views (suggested by Richard Thurgood)
- 22nd September 2009: v1.14
- Fixed a critical bug that caused the conversion process to fail on some SQL Server databases that used the [dbo] notation.
- 25th September 2009: v1.15
- Fixed a critical bug that caused the primary keys to be discarded
- Fixed trigger generation bug
- 4th December 2009: v1.16
- Fixed generation code to create GUID types for SQL-Server's
uniqueidentifier
type (instead of nvarchar
as it was until now) - Updated the solution to use the latest SQLite .NET provider library
- 24th March, 2011
- Attached compiled version of the project for anyone that doesn't have Visual Studio and still needs to use the utility
- 1st July, 2011
- Updated binary zip as the earlier one was missing the DLL file needed by the application
- 15th Nov 2011: v1.17
- Fixed a bug that caused the software to crash when encountering
NULL
values in some of SQL Server meta data tables
- 19th June 2012: v1.19
- Added support for ignoring views when creating the DB schema, Added support for blank characters inside column names.
- 14th January 2013: v1.20
- Fixed problem with column names
- Added more width to the database names combo box.
My name is Liron Levi and I'm developing software for fun & profit for 15 years already.