Recently I ran into the situation that I had to migrate a file basd H2 database to another relational database. At the beginning I was kind of scared that there will be no proper and quick solution. After a bit of research I found a very easy way that I would like to share with you. We also need to have Java installed and get a little utility from H2.

Download H2, prepare script and… Fire!

Let’s cd into the directory where our .mv.db file is stored, let’s call it vocablesDb.mv.db for now. Then we will download H2 as JAR-file:

wget -O h2.jar http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/com/h2database/h2/1.4.197/h2-1.4.197.jar

Now we will create the file query.sql. It contains a simple SQL instruction to dump the databases schema and data to a file called db-dump.sql:

echo "SCRIPT TO 'db-dump.sql'" > query.sql

Now we can connect the dots and use a utility from the H2 Java library:

java -cp h2.jar org.h2.tools.RunScript -url "jdbc:h2:file:./vocablesDb" -user username -password pazzword -script query.sql -showResults

This should be pretty much everything. You will find the complete SQL dump in db-dump.sql now. If you get an error, H2 will tell you pretty much what you did wrong. Maybe you got the URL or credentials wrong?!