TEXT data migrate from Sybase to SQL Server

Question

I'm working on migrating Sybase ASE 15.7 SP134 database to SQL Server 2008R2, using SSMA for Sybase 2014.

I'm facing an issue where a table in SybaseDB has 2 columns with the data type TEXT. The SQL Server table with datatype "text" is mismatching on Japanese data characters.

Questions are:

1. How can we keep same text as Sybase while migrating data?

2. How to keep Non-ASCII characters as it is during migration?

Please comment if more information can be provided.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to change the default datatype mapping in SSMA to NVARCHAR for sqlserver since the default mapping for text is nvarchar.

Make sure to save the settings... Choose Tools, Project Settings, Type Mapping from the menu.

See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ssma/2011/03/06/access-to-sql-server-migration-understanding-data-type-conversions

Answer 2

1. Stop using text data types -- they're long deprecated. If you need to, use NTEXT instead to preserve Unicode characters. But that's not a great idea.

2. Do the smart thing and use NVARCHAR(MAX) instead, because that's not deprecated, and will handle your Unicode long text data just fine.