Re: Ora2Pg (was PL/pgSQL: EXCEPTION NOSAVEPOINT)

On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 12:29 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > still trying to hold on to my fantasy that I can hack Postgres (and
> > contrib/ora2pg) into submission.
>
> I'm happy to work with you on ora2pg

Cool.

It looks like I should have referred to contrib/oracle, not
contrib/ora2pg, but you got my point.

The latest version I found of ora2pg is at
http://www.samse.fr/GPL/ora2pg/ora2pg-3.3.tar.gz  This seems to be more
recent than the version at contrib/oracle.  For example, this newer
version has tablespace support.  Given this as a starting point, I've
made the attached changes.  Mostly I've added a few new config options,
but I also made a correction to the existing EXCLUDE option, and I
corrected a couple spelling/English errors along the way.

A big thing that's lacking is conversion for stored procedures and
functions.  My initial approach to this was to use Perl to post-process
the PL/SQL code dumped by the export, making it look more like proper
Pl/pgSQL (e.g. VARCHAR2->VARCHAR).  I'm no Perl hacker, and when I came
across significant PL/SQL <--> PL/pgSQL differences (e.g. PL/pgSQL
exception == rollback), I added to my approach the idea of hacking
PL/pgSQL to make it look more like PL/SQL.  Attacking the problem from
both ends like this, I imagined that Nirvana would be reached somewhere
in the middle.

The beginning of my Perl-based attempt to convert PL/SQL into PL/pgSQL
is a pretty simple stand-alone script.  I can send it if you like, but
I'm a Perl newbie, so you can probably do much better.  My attempts to
make PL/pgSQL look like PL/SQL have been posted to -hackers and -patches
over the last couple months.