Migrating from ebase to Salesforce.com

Last Updated on Thursday, 9 February 2006 11:57 Written by Steve Thursday, 9 February 2006 11:57

I’m up to my neck in migrating an org’s data from the venerable Filemaker application ebase 1.0 to Salesforce.com.

Turns out that taking complex relational data from one schema and migrating it to another complex relational schema takes some time.

I plan to write up a detailed article about this process and what I’ve learned, but I don’t have time. Right now I’ll just list out the tools that make this migration possible:

• Filemaker is needed to open up ebase. I have a dusty old 5.5 copy that just barely works for me.
• MS Excel is needed as an intermediary. Export all the filemaker tables to CSV. I do a lot of Excel formulas to transform data (like combining area code and phone number, but only if the phone number isn’t longer than 8 characters, and only if the area code exists, etc.)
• MS Access becomes the main workspace for me. I bring all the data in there, then use queries to transform it further for export to CSV on the way to Salesforce.com
• I would jump out a window if I didn’t have the SForce Data Loader. Seriously. Don’t try this without this tool. It’s amazing and can save you lots of steps if you use it right (I sense another blog post…)

That’s pretty much it. You can do it all in Excel, but Access helps me a lot. Did I mention that the SForce Data Loader is great? And not just for data migrations. Want to change everyone’s Country from US to USA? 3 minute operation with the Data Loader. 2 minutes of that is waiting for the records to come across the Internet.

Wish me luck on my current project and I hope to write up the million things I’m learning along the way as soon as I have time (August?).

Hopefully sooner.