Impacts of Data Conversion on Your Current Systems

Data conversion is useful when you want to migrate your current system and convert your database into a format appropriate for the new platform.

When the conversion has been performed, you should perform a number of checks on your new database, including database certifications, logical certifications, and any application-specific checks that may be required.

When converting your JADE system to different hardware or operating system, you may need to address other issues, including:

• Create a version of your schemas that can work on both ANSI and Unicode, with the code that is ANSI/Unicode susceptible protected with appropriate usage of the Application class isUnicode method.

  It is best if the code changes happen in the ANSI system before the conversion takes place.

• If you encrypt passwords into a Binary value, be aware that the results of that encryption may be different in Unicode than it was in ANSI, and that the Binary values will not have been converted.

• If you store any large string values as compressed binaries to save storage space, you must uncompress these to normal strings before you perform the database conversion and then recompress them again when the database has been converted to Unicode.

• Thoroughly test any external system interfaces and any third-party libraries that you use, as some third‑party libraries may not have Unicode versions.

  A similar approach may be necessary for TCP/IP interfaces.

• Check for any usage of Windows API calls, and if appropriate, change to the "wide" version if applicable; for example, ShellExecuteA in shell32 needs to become ShellExecuteW in shell32.

• Locale issues; for example, sorting order.