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Migration Jobs and External Files

Migration Jobs

Migration jobs can be used to import external data and export IFS data to external systems.

When importing data files, “CREATE_TABLE_FROM_FILE” and “MIGRATE_SOURCE_DATA” procedures are often bundled together. First procedure is of “File Migration” type and does not have the capability of invoking PL/SQL methods. Second procedure uses the table created from the first step as the source and invoke PL/SQL methods to validate and insert data.

“Source Migration” can read one source table and distribute the data among multiple tables if necessary.

Migration framework support mapping and transferring data to custom objects.

Migration Jobs can be used to integrate third-party systems as well. If a file migration method is scheduled with a file location in the database server. This job will read and transfer the data of the files which reside in the specified file location. However, this approach not suitable for frequent data transfers and can be difficult to monitor and maintain. Even worse, if the environment is hosted in the cloud access to these files will be severely restricted.

Migration jobs should not be considered as an integration alternative when other options are available.

External Files

IFS Application provides the user a toolkit to import and export data with the External File interface.

File type and the file template determines the structure of the data and the execution logic.

There are multiple off-the-shelf templates delivered with the standard IFS installation which can be used to transfer most used financial documents.

Like migration jobs, data can be transferred to multiple tables using multiple record types in the file type. However, the data execution logic must be manually implemented.

External file interface can be used for integrations using the batch mode. This will facilitate reading files from a server location. However same drawbacks discussed under Migration jobs exist in this situation as well. Therefore, External File interface should only be used by the user to manually upload the flies.

In Combination with IFS Connect

Migration jobs and external files require that files are read and/or written on the database server, which may not be accessible for an integrating system. However, the file and/or ftp connectors in IFS Connect can be used to transport files between the database server and some other location. This could for instance be an external sftp location, where the integrating system is dropping and/or picking up files. This scenario is also available in IFS Managed Cloud deployments.