Crosswalk Schema: Fill & Download for Free

Data: Factual provides data for 50 countries in a unified schema (http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/global); Localeze provides data for US and CA only. Localeze has ancillary data such as business logos and local search keywords, while Factual focuses its peripheral data efforts on extended attributes for specific verticals such as Hotels & Restaurants (http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/hotels, http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/restaurants) and contextual geotargeting data such as the Geopulse & Reverse Geocoding APIs (http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/geopulse, http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/geocode)Services: Factual provides data downloads combined with a holistic suite of data engineering and context relevance tools (Search, Resolve (http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/resolve), Crosswalk (http://www.factual.com/data-apis/places/crosswalk), Geopulse, and Geocoding APIs) while Localeze provides data downloads and services centered on the Local Search use case, and business identity management, including a local search API called ContentReach.Focus & Ethos: These are the critical points here, from my perspective:Openness: Factual provides heavy-duty data inspection tools on their website and via the API, publish attribute densities and other metadata, and expose their IDs and cross-reference them to other namespaces in a machine-readable format. Our thinking is that making our data hugely visible will reveal its flaws, but most importantly accelerate their correction. Localeze appears to hold their data a bit closer to their bosom: there are no free API tiers (I am aware of), online data browsing tools exist but are minimal, and developers must register to see the API documentation (this last one always irks me from any vendor). Note that Localeze are much more open than most data vendors, cf. InfoGroup.Scope: in short, Factual is a data company: Factual's ambitions are larger than Local (they now have a nascent Global Products database) and they are focused on providing a definitive, global data platform for developers and other engineers generally, and to assist with geo targeting and context relevance in particular. Localeze is a Local Search company, focused on providing services to help SMBs and consumers better connect. Factual thinks Data first, Local second, while Localeze reverses these priorities.This final point can be seen as subjective, of course, and is best balanced with input from someone on the Localeze side of the question.

I. Western governments cannot simply displace private citizens to make way for new buildings for private interests. It also involves lengthy procedures and compensation.There are historic protection laws on ancient city buildings in the West, particularly in Europe:Western governments are secular democracies and cannot simply expropriate private property in order to demolish and build private interest modern developments, only for State infrastructure of national utility.Many projects have been stopped or delayed and modified by public protests such as the proposed West France airport near Nantes. Although “eminent domain” could have been used to seize the land, encamped protesters (zadistes) over ecological and environmental detriment eventually were successful in keeping the land protected (ZAD or Zone À Défendre) Western governments are loathe to undertake actions that get them voted out of office.II. Europeans value historic architecture as cultural assets, some of which are built out of stone that have stood for centuries - much longer than any modern structure is expected to last. However, one must distinguish between countries that invest in their cultural sites and those that, for lack of budget or political will or professional civil service, allow ancient sites to fall into ruin; in such countries, ancient buildings are dangerous and unpleasant.If we focus on countries where historic sites are formally valued as cultural assets, the first example of which is France, the first to create the post of Minister of Culture, cultural assets are restored, maintained and highlighted; it is probably one of the reasons that France is the most visited country on earth by international travelers. So, one could say that France has correctly invested in its cultural heritage with the benefits of tourism and national promotion.As a result, the urban core is usually the older part and the most expensive neighborhood while modern buildings are in the suburbs, far away from the center.Most Europeans would prefer to live in a modernized, well-maintained, attractive older building instead of some bland culturally-non-specific modern building.A residential building in Paris - central and expensiveA residential building in Paris suburbs - far from the center and blandIII. European Cities have excellent infrastructure - but it’s often seamlessly integrated to accommodate the ancient core.In Paris, public transport is excellent, allowing people to survive without a car for commuting by a mix of subways, high-speed suburban rail, trams and buses in dedicated lanes. This takes great expertise, funds and time as excavation under an ancient city invariably halts when ancient artefacts and ruins are unearthed.Here is a 1937 cutaway of the underground civil engineering in Paris:There are no utility poles for electricity, phones or cable. Gas and other lines are buried, out of sight. This is as much for aesthetics as infrastructure security.Here is the tram in the centre of Bordeaux, a World Heritage Site. You can note that the tram’s color does not detract from the historic stone architecture and that the pedestrian crosswalk is in Travertine marble.IV. Infrastructure is not just buildings and roads. Public Health, Urban transport, Water supply, Waste Management, Sewerage, Urban Planning and Pollution Control is generally very good in W. EuropeThe levels of air pollution is much better in Europe than many Chinese cities that have “modern buildings” (Let’s not even mention the petroleum-related pollution in “ultra modern” Gulf States’ cities.) Centuries of proactive urban planning and civil engineering for urban environments represent accumulated know-how in parts of Europe. Even the strategic-thinking Japanese visit Paris to examine the multi-decade Master Planning process for regional urban development. Le schéma directeur de la Région Île-de-France (SDRIF)IV. European cities have modern architecture but they are located outside of the historic core in most cases. They are of little tourist interest, disconnected from the country’s culture, often chosen by award after an international competition; few Europeans would want to live there.This is the skyscraper business district just outside of Paris proper, La DefenseThis is the Canary Wharf district near LondonFrankfurt is mostly modern buildings as much was destroyed in the World WarsEven Rome that has been around for over 3 millennia, has very modern architecture - outside of the historic centerA waterside building in Valencia, Spain

So in data migration, you best bet is not with canned tools but with some kind of script tool like visual studio (or eclipse, whatever, it just needs to be able to talk to the datasource you need to work with) that you can then script into a solution.SAP uses an internal database (HANA) , which has examples for attaching to C# here. I’ve never worked on SAP directly, only Peoplesoft and BAAN, so you mileage may vary, but essentially our approach (and I do data migrations for a living, and we do medical images and EMR logic migrations so its large, complex FDA standard type data) is to use a compiled solution as a bridge between multiple systems, so the code acts as a gatekeeper so that crosswalks and whatever other types of transformations can be applied as the records pass through (regex replacement is another typical function). Essentially, you break your console app or whatever up into an extraction piece, a data fixes piece, then the part that posts the clean record to the target system, and usually you will want this little app to have a database of its own to keep track of things like what has already transferred, etc. It sounds like you are trying to get data out of SAP into oracle, and ADO drivers are available for both your source (SAP) and target( Oracle) so provided you have someone on staff who can code that’s your most flexible path.As a side affair, straight Oracle conversions can be done either as ETL (the console app described above) or directly across a db_link (this is slower though, typically) provided you have a competent DBA on staff that can handle the configurations on whatever N servers you need linked together. A tip is, create a separate schema for migrations that’s isolated from whatever your core data is, it reduces confusion.Since your actual question is about tools, for oracle you want Toad or SQL Developer (oracles own tool), Visual Studio as noted above, a solid text editor (I use 010, it will open ANYTHING, any size file or format, very helpful), Notepad++ (for one off files that 010 doesn’t deal with cleanly), and vi (for large manual replaces, etc). If you have all these all you should need is Google and Codeproject to put together something to work with, but I will say ERPs are notoriously hard to migrate because of their bizarre internal architectures and weird seams where they bought and merged other companies into their logic, but a good team can pull it off (we did, we had a crashing PS SQL instance that had to move to Solaris/Oracle in a weekend a few years ago and we pulled it off with almost no preparation, it was nasty though and once PS found out we weren’t hiring them to do it they got all bitchy, and I bet SAP won’t be different, so don’t expect much help from them).Good luck, Migration is always a puzzle.