Simplify Your Life
Integration projects usually consist of two elements:
- Data to be integrated
- Operations to be performed on the data
If you have a choice, it’s a good idea to import the source data and perform the operations in the target system. For example, graphs don’t translate well between Excel and Calc, OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet. While translation problems can usually be fixed by fiddling with the graph, a better policy is to avoid the problem altogether, by importing the spreadsheet data and then generating the graph.
Translation programs are available for some open source products. One good example is Michael Kofler’s MSSQL 2 MySQL, which is a Visual Basic 6 script that can translate Microsoft-format databases into MySQL.