B LO G

Migrating from DB2 to PostgreSQL – What

You Should Know
Severalnines AC
Published February 22, 2019
Deployment & Scaling Upgrades & Patches PostgreSQL

Whether migrating a database or an application from DB2 to PostgreSQL with only one
type of database knowledge is not sufficient, there are few things to know about the
differences between the two database systems.
PostgreSQL is world’s most widely used advanced open source database. PostgreSQL
database has rich feature set and PostgreSQL community is very strong and they are
continuously improving the existing features and add new features. As per the db-
engine.com, PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the year 2017 and 2018.

As you know DB2 and PostgreSQL are RDBMS but there are some incompatibilities. In
this blog, we can see some of these incompatibilities.

Why Migrate From DB2 to PostgreSQL

Flexible open source licencing and easy availability from public cloud providers like
AWS, Google cloud, Microsoft Azure.
Benefit from open source add-ons to improve database performance.

You can see in the below image that PostgreSQL popularity is increasing over time as
compared to DB2.

Interest Over Time

Migration Assessment
The first step of migration is to analyze the application and database object, find out the
incompatibilities between both the databases and estimate the time and cost required for
migration.

Data Type Mapping

Some of the data types of IBM DB2 does not match directly with PostgreSQL data types,
so you need to change it to corresponding PostgreSQL data type.

Please check the below table.

IBM DB2 PostgreSQL

BIGINT 64-bit integer BIGINT

BLOB(n) Binary large object BYTEA

CLOB(n) Character large object TEXT

DBCLOB(n) UTF-16 character large object TEXT

NCLOB(n) UTF-16 character large object TEXT

CHAR(n), CHARACTER(n) Fixed-length string CHAR(n)

CHARACTER VARYING(n) Variable-length string VARCHAR(n)

NCHAR(n) Fixed-length UTF-16 string CHAR(n)

NCHAR VARYING(n) Variable-length UTF-16 string VARCHAR(n)

VARCHAR(n) Variable-length string VARCHAR(n)

VARGRAPHIC(n) Variable-length UTF-16 string VARCHAR(n)

VARCHAR(n) FOR BIT DATA Variable-length byte string BYTEA

NVARCHAR(n) Varying-length UTF-16 string VARCHAR(n)

GRAPHIC(n) Fixed length UTF-16 string CHAR(n)

INTEGER 32-bit integer INTEGER

NUMERIC(p,s) Fixed-point number NUMERIC(p,s)

DECIMAL(p,s) Fixed-point number DECIMAL(p,s)

DOUBLE PRECISION Double precision floating point number DOUBLE PRECISION

FLOAT(p) Double precision floating point number DOUBLE PRECISION

REAL
IBM DB2 Single precision floating point number REAL
PostgreSQL
 SMALLINT 16-bit integer SMALLINT

DATE Date(year, month and day) DATE

TIME TIME (hour, minute, and second) TIME(0)

TIMESTAMP(p) Date and time with fraction TIMESTAMP(p)

DECFLOAT(16 | 34) IEEE Floating point number FLOAT

Incompatibilities in DB2 and PostgreSQL

There are many incompatibilities present in DB2 and PostgreSQL, you can see some of
them here. You can automate them by creating extensions so that you can use the DB2
function as it is in PostgreSQL and you can save your time. Please check the behaviour of
DB2 function in PostgreSQL

TABLESPACE
TABLESPACE clause defines the name of the tablespace in which the newly created
table resides.

DB2 uses IN clause for TABLESPACE so it should be replaced by TABLESPACE clause in

PostgreSQL.

Example:

DB2:

IN

PostgreSQL:

TABLESPACE

FIRST FETCH n ROWS ONLY

FIRST FETCH n ROWS ONLY
In DB2, you can use FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY clause to retrieve no more than n rows.
In PostgreSQL, you can use LIMIT n which is equivalent to FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY.

Example:

DB2:

SELECT * FROM EMP

ORDER BY EMPID

FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT * FROM EMP

ORDER BY EMPID

LIMIT 10;

GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY

The IDENTITY column in DB2 can be replaced by Serial column in PostgreSQL.

DB2:

CREATE TABLE (

INTEGER NOT NULL

GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY (START WITH 1, INCREMENT BY 1, CACHE 20)

);

PostgreSQL:

CREATE TABLE (

SERIAL NOT NULL

 );

Select from SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1

There is no “SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1” table in PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL allows a “SELECT”
without ”FROM” clause. You can remove this by using script.

Scalar Functions: DB2 vs PostgreSQL

CEIL/CEILING
CEIL or CEILING returns the next smallest integer value that is greater than or equal to
the input (e.g. CEIL(122.89) returns 123, also CEIL(122.19) returns 123).

DB2:

SELECT CEIL(123.89) FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

SELECT CEILING(123.89) FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT CEIL(123.89) ;

SELECT CEILING(123.89) ;

DATE
It converts the input to date values. You can convert DATE function to TO_DATE function
in PostgreSQL.

DB2:

SELECT DATE ('2018-09-21') FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT TO_DATE ('21-09-2018',’DD-MM-YYYY’) ;

DAY
It returns the day (day of the month) part of a date or equivalent value. The output format
is integer.

DB2:

SELECT DAY (DATE('2016-09-21')) FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT DATE_PART('day', '2016- 09-21'::date);

MONTH
It returns the month part of the date value. The output format is integer.

DB2:

SELECT MONTH (DATE('2016-09-21')) FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT DATE_PART ('month', '2016-09- 21'::date);

POSSTR
Returns the position of string. The POSSTR function is replaced by POSITION function in
PostgreSQL.

DB2:

Usage : POSSTR(,)

SELECT POSSTR('PostgreSQL and DB2', 'and') FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

Usage: POSITION( IN)

SELECT POSITION('and' IN'PostgreSQL and DB2');

RAND
It returns a pseudorandom floating-point value in the range of zero to one inclusive. You
can replace RAND function to RANDOM in PostgreSQL.

DB2:

SELECT RAND() FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1;

PostgreSQL:

SELECT RANDOM();

Tools
You can use some tools to migrate DB2 database to PostgreSQL. Please test the tool
before use it.
 Db2topg

It is an automated tool for DB2 to PostgreSQL migration like ora2pg. The scripts in the
db2pg tool converts as much as possible of a DB2 UDB database. This tool does not
work with DB2 zOS. It is very simple to use, you need a SQL dump of your schema
and then use db2pg script to convert it to a PostgreSQL schema.

Full convert

Enterprise tool quickly copies DB2 database to PostgreSQL. The conversion of DB2 to
PostgreSQL database using Full Convert tool is very simple.
Steps:

Connect to the source database i.e. DB2

Optional: Choose the tables that you want to convert(by default all the tables
selected)
Start the conversion.

Conclusion
As we could see, migrating from DB2 to PostgreSQL is not rocket science, but we need
to keep in mind the thing that we saw earlier to avoid big issues in our system. So, we
only need to be careful in the task and go ahead, you can migrate to the most advanced
open source database and take advantage of its benefits.

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