Feature Question - Can this be used to convert DB platforms?

[crazytonyi]

Sorry that this is flagged as an issue. Really more of a question that you might want to consider touching on in your wiki or expanding on as a dedicated feature...

So the DB connector uses PDO, does this mean this is intended to work with Sugar instances on various DB platforms (that Sugar already supports) like SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle? If this is hypothetically possible, has the tool been QA'd to confirm reliable functionality on the various permutations of the supported DB platforms?

Assuming that use of PDO is meant to insure the tool can connect to any Sugar instance's DB, does this mean that the tool could, hypothetically, be used to convert a given Sugar instance's DB from one platform to another? If all it is doing is connecting via the relevant DB driver over a PDO object and then using sugar-specific domain-based knowledge to push/pull the data in a "Sugar aware" way, could the tool include some sort of "clone" function that not only could do a pure 1-to-1 clone of a given instance, but also (provided the correct, functional details are passed in to connect to two different DB platforms) "move" the data from one DB platform to another (for example, pull the data from a MySQL-based instance and push it into a SQL Server-based instance)? Or is this still the sort of ambitious task best left to dedicated data-transfer tools like Talend?

[remisauvat]

We use the PDO connector with the goal of being able to extend to all DB vendors supported by Sugar, but for now we only have tested it with a MySQL back-end for various Sugar and PHP versions.

One issue with using a PHP tool to perform an 1-to-1 clone would be the inability to use multiple sugar instances in one process. Because PHP classes and functions from one instance would overlap the other.
One way around would be to convert the instance to an intermediary format (CSV, JSON, ...) and then import to the destination instance.
Another idea would be to connect to the sugar instances using the rest API, but I suspect some tables are not available in REST.

So for now, if you need to migrate from MySQL to Oracle for example, the best way would be to use a SQL compatible format or use an ETL like Talend.