Moving all assets from one metadata repository to another

You can move all of your metadata assets to a different instance of InfoSphere® Information Server by using just a few istool commands.

Before you begin

You must have the required role to export each type of asset. See the documentation for each command, which is linked in the procedure.

You must run istool commands from a computer where the istool framework or required products are installed. If you are transferring assets from InfoSphere FastTrack or InfoSphere Streams, run the command from a client tier computer. See Location of the istool command line.

About this task

To transfer your metadata between environments, or to migrate to a newer version of InfoSphere Information Server, you can export most of the assets in the metadata repository to archive files by using a single istool export command with the -all parameter. Dependent assets and relationships to other assets are also exported.

You can then import the contents of the archive files into the target environment by using the istool import command with the -all parameter.

The -all parameter exports and imports metadata of the following types:

Note: Data connections that are exported when you use the -all parameter do not work in the target environment unless the name of the target host system is the same as the name of the source host system. When that is not the case, export only data connections by using the -cm parameter. Import the data connections by using a mapping file to specify the source host name as the current value and the target host name as the new value.

If you do not want to export all types of metadata assets or include all related metadata, you can use the separate import and export commands for each metadata type, without using the -all parameter.

The following types of assets cannot be transferred by using the -all parameter:

InfoSphere DataStage® and QualityStage® assets, such as projects, jobs, and stages.
InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog assets, such as categories, terms, information governance rules, information governance policies, extended data sources, and extension mapping documents.

The following procedure shows how to export and then import all metadata assets in the metadata repository by using the -all parameter and by using commands for assets that are not supported by the -all parameter. You can script the commands.

Procedure

Run the istool export command with the -all parameter.

Run the following commands as needed:

To export all assets of these types	Do this
InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage assets	Run the istool export command with the -ds parameter to export each InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage project.
Glossary assets, including categories, terms, information governance rules, and information governance policies	Run the istool glossary export command with the -allcategories and -allpoliciesrules parameters, and specify all of the -include parameters.
Extended data source and extension mapping documents	Run the istool export command with the -igc parameter and a type_to_export value of `/.eds, //*.emd`.

To import the assets that were exported by using the -all parameter, run the istool import command with the -all parameter.

To import the assets that were exported in step 2, run the following commands as needed:

To import these types of assets	Do this
InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage and QualityStage assets	Run the istool import command with the -ds parameter.
Glossary assets	Run the istool glossary import command.
Extended data source and extension mapping documents	Run the istool import command with the -igc parameter.