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I am currently working on several projects to migrate legacy applications from a Sybase ASE (12.5 and 15.0) to a Microsoft SQL Server 2014 platform.

There will be a need to replicate data in both directions while the old and new applications are being developed.

I was looking for advice regarding how others have approached this problem.

Some ideas we're looking into:

  1. Sybase Replication Server (Expensive)
  2. Third party Apps (Not sure if it will be stable?)
  3. Custom Stored Procedures in Sybase for Update, Insert and Delete and configure those to be called when the data comes in. (Reliability and difficulty of supporting)
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  • Why are you developing old and new applications at the same time as migration from ASE to SQL Server? You should be able to make very minimal changes to the existing app to point it at SQL Server since both T-SQL languages are extremely similar. You should probably use SSIS to migrate data from ASE to SQL Server in a non-production environment so you can get the app working when pointed at SQL Server, then plan to migrate without using bi-directional-replication.
    – Hannah Vernon ♦
    May 23 '17 at 18:32
  • Sounds like a risky approach. This may make it difficult to change the schema in the new application. You don't mention how frequently you need to replicate. Daily? Hourly? Five minutes?
    – Nick.McDermaid
    May 24 '17 at 1:46
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    symmetricds.org works very good in our use case. But avoiding replication would be my first try as mentioned by the previous comments
    – André Schild
    May 24 '17 at 20:37
  • Sybase Rep is not that expensive. Use table-to-table option, where the maps are auto-generated, so you don't have to create them for each table, and throughput is pretty decent. Method #2 - linked Sybase server and MS SQL own replication.
    – access_granted
    Jun 14 '17 at 0:33
  • Thanks for the insight. Old apps will not be developed... that was a poor choice of words. We will leave the old apps in place while the data is migrated to the new database\systems. Converting apps to a new database will not be a trivial process... we'd have to spend millions to rewrite numerous control systems (Siemens, Rockwell, etc) and re-point them. The only way for us to do that economically would be to wait until they are end of life.
    – Super1337
    Jun 29 '17 at 22:27
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We ended up using the SymmetricDS application and have been moving applications over to MSSQL gradually. So far, so good! Thanks for the help everyone.

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