Introduction
I needed to convert the existing SQL server databases to SQLite databases as part of a DB migration program and did not find any decent free converter to do the job.
This is my attempt to solve the problem. I should warn you though that I did not have much time to test it on too many databases. In any case - the source code is very well documented and easy to understand, so if you do have a problem it should be relatively
easy to fix. (Please send me the fixed source code. If you do so, I can update the software so that everybody can enjoy it.)
Using the Code
The code is split between a dataaccess project (class library) that contains the conversion code itself and a converter project (WinForms) that drives the conversion code and provides a simple UI for user interaction.
The main class that performs the conversion is the sqlservertosqlite class.
It does the conversion by doing the following steps:
-
Reading the designated SQL server schema and preparing a list of
tableschema objects
that contain the schema for each and every SQL server table (and associated structures like indexes).
-
Preparing an empty sqlite database file with the schema that was read from SQL server. In this step, the code may alter few SQL-server types that are not supported directly in sqlite.
-
Copying rows for each table from the SQL server database to the sqlite database.
Basically, that's it!
Points of Interest
In order to read the SQL server DB schema, I was mainly using the pseudo information_schema.table table.
You can find more information about it on the Internet if you want
