Hi there, here in the company we have applications in access, fox pro, oracle, mysql, excel, etc, etc.
In order to create one big database, what would be the best strategy ?
assuming the final database is for example mysql.
would be to re-code all the applications ?
or only change their tables now to point to the final database.

greetings
Mario Vi

There are a few thousand options. You have to pick the one that makes the most sense for your organization.

Just as an observation, many of the databases you are converting from are more powerful (syntactically more expressive if you want to be picky about it) than MySQL is, so you've got quite a task ahead of you!

-PatP

You might try creating data models of each and then determining where they overlap to give you one or several larger data models.

In that overlap you have to ask if your key data conforms to the key data in the other databases otherwise, merged or not your databases won't be able to relate their content.

Creating all new applications seems like a mammoth task. But if you want them to share a common database you may be forced to do so. You might be able to peform the task in phases.