Migration from proprietary commercial DMBS such as SQL Server into free open-source equivalents such as MySQL is a modern trend of IT industry. Being is a part of the famous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), MySQL is available on all operational systems and platforms including Windows. All those reasons force many companies to migrate from SQL Server to MySQL.
Prior to adopting a new technology, businesses typically weigh the commercial and technical benefits associated with that technology. While each company employs its unique approach to such assessments, the primary determinants influencing the decision to embrace or disregard a technology include the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the credibility of the software vendor. Notably, SQL Server tends to carry a substantial TCO for managing extensive data warehouses, coupled with a relatively restrictive licensing policy. Conversely, MySQL stands out as an open-source DBMS, accompanied by an extensive array of complimentary management and development tools.
On account of its superior performance, dependability, and scalability, MySQL has emerged as the foremost choice among DBMS for web-based applications. Numerous globally renowned enterprises, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia, employ MySQL or its derivatives to manage their expansive corporate data repositories. Furthermore, being under the umbrella of Oracle Corporation, MySQL benefits from top-tier global support services. And these are more reasons for database migration from SQL Server to MySQL.
Although migrating schema, data and indexes from SQL Server to MySQL is not a big issue, it is better to automate it through the specially designed software. Manual approach to the migration may lead to data loss or corruption due to human errors. This whitepaper covers few automation tools to migrate from SQL Server to MySQL.
MySQL Workbench
MySQL Workbench is a powerful database administration framework that allows to design, develop and manage MySQL databases. It has data and meta-data visualization capabilities, advanced SQL editor and useful tools for different administration tasks including database migration.
Some features of MySQL Workbench are specially designed to simplify migration from SQL Server to MySQL:
- Allows to configure, copy, edit, execute and schedule the migration procedure
- Allows to specify the data source and to assess it before migration
- Allows to select/exclude individual database objects to migrate, control types mapping and specify other rules of the migration
- Option to export migration scripts for validation and manual edit
- Option to configure post-processing events when it is necessary
Valuable advantage of MySQL Workbench is that it’s free and cross platform, however there are some issues when using the tool to migrate from SQL Server to MySQL:
- possible errors like ‘Could not successfully convert UCS-2 string to UTF-8’ caused by conversion of character sets. The workaround is to install ODBC driver for SQL Server that works with UTF8. It requires some extra steps that makes using MySQL Workbench not so comfortable
- MySQL Workbench does not migrate views, stored procedures, functions and triggers
- There is no detailed logging in MySQL Workbench that makes hard to debug potential errors
SQL Server to MySQL Converter
There is commercial solution to migrate from SQL Server to MySQL offered by Intelligent Converters software company that do not have the limitations of MySQL Workbench. This tool allows to rich high performance of the migration due to low-level algorithms of reading and writing data. Other features of the tool:
- Supports all modern versions of SQL Server and MySQL including SAAS variations and forks
- Merge and synchronize existing MySQL tables with SQL Server data
- Export SQL Server data into MySQL script file (this option is suitable when the target server does not accept remote connections)
- Command line support allows to script and schedule the database migration
- Option to filter and pre-process SQL Server data via SELECT-queries before migration
According to Intelligent Converters policy, SQL Server to MySQL converter comes with 1-year subscription for updates and unlimited 24/7 support.
