Some organizations consider database migration from SQL Server to MySQL server in order to reduce TCO, remove vendor lock or take some other benefits of open-source software. Coming toward these requirements, software vendors offer the specially designed tools called “database converter”. Database converter are capable of migrating the entire database or selected objects from SQL Server to MySQL.
It is expected that advanced SQL Server to MySQL migration tools support all major versions of SQL Server such as 2014, 2016, 2019 and work with Unix, Linux and Windows MySQL including such variations as MariaDB and Percona. Valuable advantage of the database converter is support for Azure SQL, cloud variation of SQL Server DBMS.
Other basic features of SQL Server to MySQL converters are:
- Support for all built-in data types of SQL Server
- Accurate conversion of table definitions, primary keys, indexes and constraints with all necessary attributes
- Intelligent types mapping and data processing with respect to distinguishes between SQL Server and MySQL
- Option to convert SQL Server views into MySQL format
- Support for command line for scripting and scheduling the conversion
- Different options of processing existing MySQL tables – overwrite, merge or synchronize
- Support for Windows 7/8/10/11
- Unicode support
- User-friendly interface
- Full install and uninstall support
SQL Server to MySQL database conversion tools have price ranging from zero to multiple hundreds of dollars. Database experts usually do not recommend work with freeware due to lack of technical support and conversion quality guarantees. Related investigations discovered that the ideal performance-price proportion is reached by database converters with price around $50.
One of the tools having basic capabilities listed above is SQL Server to MySQL converter by Intelligent Converters. This software company provides solutions for database migration and synchronization since 2001. Besides fulfillment of the key requirements that are demanded for the database migration, their tool provides the following extra advantages:
- For those cases when MySQL server does not accept remote connections, the program can export the data into SQL script file. In this approach MS SQL data is exported into local file containing data definition (DDL) statements to create tables with all indexes and constraints and fill them with the data. Later database specialist will be able to import this file to MySQL server using the standard tools like phpMyAdmin.
- Sometimes it is required to convert partial data from a table or merge data from multiple tables into a single one. For these purposes SQL Server to MySQL converter allows to convert result of SELECT queries running against the source SQL Server database.
- If there is a need to change column name or type in the resulting database, the converter provides feature called “custom column mapping”. This feature allows changing name, type, default value and NULL-attribute for any column of MS SQL table as well as exclude certain columns from conversion.
Find more information about Intelligent Converters and their SQL Server to MySQL conversion tool at the official site of the company.
