Getting started
Nothing here needs your own database. There are 13 demo databases, and everything below can be done with one of them, signed in or not.
1.Open something
Go to the workbench. Pick a demo on the left, or fill in the connection form for a database of your own — host, user, password, database — and press Connect & Extract Schema. A dump file can be uploaded instead, on the estimate page.
Reading takes seconds and writes nothing: i2b reads the schema and a sample of rows. One screen can write to a source database — the Junk Cleaner — and only when asked; it is described at the bottom of this page.
2.See what it holds
Schema List is every table with its columns, and what each one was understood to be. Interactive Knowledge Graph is the same thing drawn: tables as boxes, relationships as lines. Data Instances Graph is the rows themselves — press Rows for a list with a search box.
3.Read the losses
Migration Gaps is the part worth your time. It compares what your database holds against what the target can hold, and lists every column with one of five dispositions: carried into a field, carried after a conversion, kept in the target’s catch-all pocket, deliberately dropped, or unaccounted for.
Only the last kind asks for a signature. Nothing can be exported while something is unaccounted for — you can accept a loss, and you cannot leave one unexamined.
4.Correct what is wrong
Everything the analysis decided can be overruled: a wrong relationship, a table read as the wrong kind of thing, a value buried inside a cell, a row that should not travel. Correcting a migration walks through the six of them.
Corrections are kept per workspace and survive a reload. Keeping them needs a licence; making them does not.
5.Rehearse, then migrate
A dry run produces the statements a real run would send, and a report of what each entity would write. It is a prediction of the write made by the same code that performs it, which is why it is worth reading rather than skipping.
Writing into a target database, or taking away an executable script, needs a licence — which one, and why.
What this does not do
Reading, analysing and correcting never write to your database. Every correction is a decision kept on our side, and your source is left exactly as it was found.
One exception, and it is deliberate. The Junk Cleaner can drop a table, empty one, or delete rows matching a rule — in the source. It does that only when somebody presses it, only with a licence that permits editing data, never on a demo, and it writes a backup file of everything it removes first. It is the one screen in the product that changes the database you connected.
It does not migrate a running site’s files — themes, uploads, plugin code. It carries what is in the database, and media that the database points at is carried as the pointer it is.
It is not an automatic migration. Somebody has to read the loss report and answer it; the product is built to make that readable, not to skip it.