Data Loader

Migrating from MSSQL to MySQL

General Reasons

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database. Its very easy to use and at the same time provides performance,
reliability and scalability,

MySQL is the first choice database for Web-based applications. It's used by internet giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and thousands of midsized companies.

It is also used as embedded database by majority of software products.

Recently MySQL is acquired by Oracle Corporation, a global leader in databases. Since it's acquisation Oracle corporation is given special focus on it's development which can be seen from the number updates released

On of the major benefit listed by user in several survey is it's low cost. The cost of running and maintaining MySQL is quantum of degrees less than the other databases.

Technical point of view

One of the Major benefit of migrating from MSSQL to MySQL is that unlike MS SQL Server, MySQL runs on almost every operating systems. You can run MySQL on Linux, Windows, MAC O/s , Solaris and many more. The customers are not bind to any one platform should there be a need to switch to another operating system.

MySQL development team have made ease of use as one of basic principle since the first release to till now. For example in Windows operating system one can download and install MySQL in just few minutes because Oracle corporation have developed an easy to use installer which makes MySQL and running and ready to deploy in just few minutes.

To make on going maintenance easy for DBA's MySQL provides self administration features like

MySQL also provides GUI based database design, development, administration and monitoring tools that make Windows database developers
and DBAs feel at home.

Other Main features available in MySQL are listed below

Preparing for MS SQL Server to MySQL migration

  1. First document the source MS SQL Server database objects, like User accounts, tables, indexes, integrity constraints and foreign key relationships

  2. Next you may have to create the target MySQL database with proper size.

  3. Choose the method of moving the tables, indexes, integrity constraints and relationships. For this you can use MySQL native migration workbench or
    third party tools like Data Loader or if you have time you can write programs in your favorite language by utilizing OLE DB Providers, ODBC drivers or .NET provider.

Both MS SQL Server and MySQL provides OLE DB Providers, ODBC drivers and .NET provider for different platforms. Writing programs from scratch may be difficult specifically if the number of tables are large. You will need to carefully choose the comparable datatypes.

Here is the listing of  SQL Server datatypes and the comparable MySQL datatypes

You can find the exact match for the following MS SQL Server datatypes, in MySQL

• BINARY
• BIT
• CHAR
• CHARACTER
• DATETIME
• DEC, DECIMAL
• FLOAT
• DOUBLE PRECESION
• INT, INTEGER
• NCHAR
• NVARCHAR, NCHAR
• NUMERIC
• REAL
• SMALLINT
• TEXT
• TIMESTAMP
• TINYINT
• VARBINARY
• VARCHAR

But the following datatypes does not have exact match in MySQL.

These can be mapped to the following MySQL datatypes

SQL Server MySQL
IDENTITY AUTO_INCREMENT
NTEXT, NATIONAL TEXT TEXT CHARACTER SET UTF8
SMALLDATETIME DATETIME
MONEY DECIMAL(19,4)
SMALL MONEY DECIMAL(10,4)
UNIQUEIDENTIFIER BINARY(16)
SYSNAME CHAR(256)

Data Loader from Interface computers, does all the above database migration from MSSQL to MySQL automatically
including automatic datatype matching.

It will just need three steps, i.e. define source database, define target database and then select tables
and that's it. You can test it by downloading a free trial edition from here