Migrate MySQL to Microsoft SQL Server

Introduction

This article describes a few simple steps in order to migrate MySQL into Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The technique is very easy, but useful if you plan to move your data from MySQL and upgrade it finally to a Microsoft SQL Server environment.

Background

Initially, I started my search for an article on CodeProject regarding MySQL->MS SQL migration without any success. I had an old PHPbb forum running, that needed to be upgraded to a Microsoft environment entirely. I could have just kept MySQL and Apache server, but instead I decided to migrate the entire concept of PHPbb to a YAF-forum.

Setup ODBC Connection to MySQL Database

This article will not go through how to setup a MySQL or Microsoft SQL server, but make sure you have downloaded at least the MySQL ODBC Connector from here.

For this article, I downloaded the MySQL ODBC Connector 5.1.

The setup of this connector is pretty simple:

• Open your ODBC Data Source Administrator from the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools. Under the tab labelled as "System DSN", press the "Add" button.

  

• On the "Create New Data Source" dialog that appeared, choose MySQL ODBC 5.1 Driver and then press the "Finish" button.

  

• After that, a MySQL connection configuration dialog will appear. Add your MySQL database account information in it, preferably the "root" account which has full access to your databases in MySQL. In this case, my database is called "tigerdb". Do not change the port to anything other than 3306, unless during your MySQL server installation, you have defined something else.

  

• Press the "Test" button to ensure your connection settings are set properly and then the "OK" button when you're done.

Create a Microsoft SQL Link to your MySQL Database

In this state, you are ready to establish a link towards MySQL database from your Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. Open a query window and run the following SQL statement:

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver 
@server = N'MYSQL', 
@srvproduct=N'MySQL', 
@provider=N'MSDASQL', 
@provstr=N'DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 5.1 Driver}; SERVER=localhost; _
	DATABASE=tigerdb; USER=root; PASSWORD=hejsan; OPTION=3'

This script will produce a link to your MySQL database through the ODBC connection you just created in the previous stage of this article. The link will appear in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio like this:

If it doesn't show up in the treeview, press the refresh button.

Import Data between the Databases

Create a new database in Microsoft SQL Server. I called mine "testMySQL". In the query window, run the following SQL statement to import table shoutbox from the MySQL database tigerdb, into the newly created database in Microsoft SQL called testMySQL.

SELECT * INTO testMySQL.dbo.shoutbox
FROM openquery(MYSQL, 'SELECT * FROM tigerdb.shoutbox')

That's it!

Points of Interest

During this migration, I had to import lately my newly migrated database into the structure of "Yet Another Forum" tables. For that, I used a series of SQL-scripts. However I am not going to post them here. If folks leave comments here about the need for these scripts, just tell me and I will gladly change this article and start adding them. You're welcome to post your comments.

Another issue you will most likely encounter are the differences between these two databases based on datatypes. I would suggest to proceed with a reverse engineering of your MySQL database (for example, Visio is one application that provides reverse engineering functionality) and start mapping all the differences and potential risks of losing parts of data for instance, within varchar columns.

Microsoft SQL datatypes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa258271.aspx

MySQL datatypes: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/visual-basic-datatypes.html

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