Migrating Oracle to SQL Server using SSMA - Error O2SS0217 Call to identity sequence CURRVAL not supported

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By Bill Ramos and Badal Bordia, Advaiya Inc.

[Updated 2/8/2012 Jiafei Yuan - Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) for Oracle v5.2. The information provided below is still valid for SSMA for Oracle v5.2. However, with SSMA v5.1, we can leverage SQL Server 2012's sequence as the conversion target for Oracle's sequences (Converting Oracle Sequence to SQL Server "Denali").]

This blog post covers some of the reasons why SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) for Oracle doesn’t convert some procedure containing a Sequence with CURRVAL function. A Sequence is an independent database object in Oracle, which automatically creates unique integers typically for primary key/foreign values. A CURRVAL is used to access the current value of the specified Sequence.

Error O2SS0217 Call to identity Sequence CURRVAL not supported

Background

When converting Sequence object with the CURRVAL function, SSMA uses two techniques namely, ‘Emulation’ and ‘Sequence to Identity conversion’. In Emulation, SSMA converts the source schema and generates two additional objects in the target SQL Server schema for each Sequence. In the ‘Sequence to Identity conversion’, SSMA does not convert the Oracle Sequence to the IDENTITY in SQL Server and generates an error, which is described in this post.

For more information on how SSMA implements the Oracle sequence object, please see the article from DBBest titled Migration of Oracle sequences to SQL Server 2005/ 2008

Reasons

In Oracle, a sequence that generates a value typically used for a primary key/foreign key relationship and the table that is using the Sequence value are completely independent. Typically, to load sequence values into table, the CURRVAL method is used with the INSERT statement.

In SQL server, we don’t have the same feature. When we want to produce key values for a table in SQL Server, we use a numeric column and call it as IDENTITY. An IDENTITY value cannot be set explicitly in SQL Server as a part of INSERT statement; hence, it generates error O2SS0217 during migration.

Possible Remedies

SSMA provides two option settings that determine how sequences are converted. One option is to convert the column using the sequence to use an identity column in SQL Server. However, if you use CURRVAL as part of an insert statement, the identity column approach will not work and triggers the error.

Consider the following example:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE proc1 AS

  t1 NUMBER;

  t2 NUMBER;

BEGIN

      SELECT customers_seq.NEXTVAL into t1 FROM dual;

      SELECT customers_seq.currval into t2 FROM dual;

END;

Here, this query refers to the procedure proc1 created in Oracle, which SSMA will try to migrate to SQL server. But if the SSMA project settings as mentioned below are your default settings:

Under the Change Sequence-to-identity Conversion tab:

· Allow sequence-to-identity conversion is selected “YES”

       [Updated: For SSMA v5.1 and later, under the Convert Sequence Generator setting, select the Using column identity option.]

· Convert CURRVAL outside triggers is selected “NO”

Then, it should give the following error:

“O2SS0217: SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle Error message: Call to identity sequence CURRVAL not supported”

To resolve this error, you should perform the following steps:

1. Click the Tools menu and select Project Settings.

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2. Then, click the General tab.

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3. Now, under ‘Sequence-to-identity Conversion’ , select ‘Allow sequence-to-identity conversion’ to “NO”.  

       [Updated: In SSMA v5.1 later, select 'Convert Sequence Generator' to “Using SSMA sequence generator”.]

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Now, apply these settings and click OK.

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There are several other errors related to CURRVAL that you may encounter. These include the following:

· O2SS0214 Column has bound sequence, but sequence was not found in source metadata

· O2SS0221 Call to identity sequence NEXTVAL not supported

· O2SS0188 Sequence not found in source metadata

References

For more information, check out the following references:

Migrating Oracle to SQL Server 2008 White Paper

CREATE SEQUENCE – Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release

Migration of Oracle sequences to SQL Server 2005/ 2008