Skip to content

Quick Start

To get started, get the latest release from https://github.com/ArveH/ABulkCopy.

You find there Releases on the right-hand side panel:

Right-hand Releases panel

  1. Open the Latest release by clicking on it.
  2. Download the "Release-vx.y.z.zip" file
  3. Unzip the file, and run: .\ABulkCopy.Cmd.exe --help

To move data from SQL Server to Postgres, you run it twice. First, you copy tables out from SQL Server into files. Then you use the same files to create tables and copy data into Postgres. Here is an example showing the command line parameters you need to use:

.\ABulkCopy.Cmd.exe -d out -r Mss
-c "Server=.;Database=mydb;Trusted_Connection=True;TrustServerCertificate=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=true"
-l D:\Temp\abulkcopy\Logs\out.log
-f d:\temp\abulkcopy\LocalDbs\mydb

.\ABulkCopy.Cmd.exe -d in -r Pg
-c "Server=localhost;Port=5432;Database=mydb;User Id=postgres;Include Error Detail=True;Command Timeout=1800;"
-l D:\Temp\abulkcopy\Logs\in.log
-f D:\temp\abulkcopy\LocalDbs\mydb

Remember that the Postgres database you copy into should be existing, empty, and containing these collations: 

DROP COLLATION IF EXISTS en_ci_ai;
CREATE COLLATION en_ci_ai (provider = 'icu', locale = 'en-u-ks-level1', deterministic = false);

DROP COLLATION IF EXISTS en_ci_ai_like;
CREATE COLLATION en_ci_ai_like (provider = 'icu',  locale = 'en-u-ks-level1',  deterministic = true);

DROP COLLATION IF EXISTS en_ci_as;
CREATE COLLATION en_ci_as (provider = 'icu', locale = 'en-u-ks-level2', deterministic = false);

DROP COLLATION IF EXISTS en_ci_as_like;
CREATE COLLATION en_ci_as_like (provider = 'icu',  locale = 'en-u-ks-level2',  deterministic = true);

The collations are needed to convert the SQL Server collations SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI and SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS to equivalent Postgres collations (to handle case insensitivity). Later, you will be able to customize this.