To move data from Sql Server to MySQL, it is certainly possible to use tools that can make connections to both data stores and manipulate data that way, such as Access, Excel, or SSIS. Here I will introduce a process that does not need any special tools or data drivers. Instead, we can use the utilities and methods that come with a standard Sql Server and MySQL install to accomplish that task.

With this approach, it is assumed that matching tables already exist on MySQL. If not, they need to be created first.

This process is comprised of these steps: first bcp command will be generated based on Sql Server database meta data (sysobjects, think information_schema in MySQL); then the generated bcp commands will be executed; the resulting csv files can then be transferred to the MySQL server, optionally it is possible to compress them if the size is big; and finally the csv files will be imported into MySQL with LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE. …

Often times, production data needs to be moved to different environments for testing/developing purposes. However, some of that data can be people’s name, birthday, address, account number, etc., that we don’t want testers and/or developers to see, due to privacy and regulatory concerns. Hence the need to mask those data. I can certainly see this needs grow over time for all database platforms. There are software out there that does this sort of task, or similar tasks, such as data generation tool. Oracle actually has a Data Masking Pack since 10g for this purpose. Here are some of my thoughts on this topic.

One method of masking data is through reshuffling, which shuffles the value in target column(s) that you want to protect randomly across different rows.

Another way of doing it is through data generation. For instance, for target column(s), we just replace its value with something else.

For reshuffling, obviously …

Ben Kaufman at SQLServerCentral introduces MySQL to the SQL Server DBA crowd. All in all his views seem to be fairly positive, in particular the MySQL Cluster experience:

NDB is the gem of MySQL, originally developed by Ericson to track cell phone calls this is a share nothing cluster engine stored in memory. This is a true cluster that supports both high availability and load balancing. [...]
This engine is similar to synchronous mirroring in SQL Server in that it is a 2-phase commit, the difference being the commit is done in memory at the data layer not the log. Logs are hardened at a later time, with the theory being that since data is committed on multiple nodes the data is safe and doesn't require a log flush as part of the transaction. [...]
For pure performance the cluster is comparable with a single instance of SQL Server. I've …

Ben Kaufman at SQLServerCentral introduces MySQL to the SQL Server DBA crowd. All in all his views seem to be fairly positive, in particular the MySQL Cluster experience:

NDB is the gem of MySQL, originally developed by Ericson to track cell phone calls this is a share nothing cluster engine stored in memory. This is a true cluster that supports both high availability and load balancing. [...]
This engine is similar to synchronous mirroring in SQL Server in that it is a 2-phase commit, the difference being the commit is done in memory at the data layer not the log. Logs are hardened at a later time, with the theory being that since data is committed on multiple nodes the data is safe and doesn't require a log flush as part of the transaction. [...]
For pure performance the cluster is comparable with a single instance of SQL Server. I've …

Ben Kaufman at SQLServerCentral introduces MySQL to the SQL Server DBA crowd. All in all his views seem to be fairly positive, in particular the MySQL Cluster experience:

NDB is the gem of MySQL, originally developed by Ericson to track cell phone calls this is a share nothing cluster engine stored in memory. This is a true cluster that supports both high availability and load balancing. [...]
This engine is similar to synchronous mirroring in SQL Server in that it is a 2-phase commit, the difference being the commit is done in memory at the data layer not the log. Logs are hardened at a later time, with the theory being that since data is committed on multiple nodes the data is safe and doesn't require a log flush as part of the transaction. [...]
For pure performance the cluster is comparable with a single instance of SQL Server. I've …

I will take MySQL certification exams, therefore I am going through MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide. It is a pretty cool book in that it goes to the point right away without many wasted words. Too many technical books dance around the topic, fill the volume with screen shots, but do not deliver the goods in the end. I am reading the Safari online version. With so many pages, I can see the physical book can be bulky.

Anyway, some comments and observations:

1. Sybase, MySQL, and Sql Server’s definition and implementation of database and schema are somewhat close. I dislike Microsoft’s definition and usage of schema, especially in Sql Server 2005. It is very confusing to new or DBAs from other platforms.

Sybase, MySQL, and Sql Server all support the USE …

As an independent consultant and trainer , I found myself doing a lot of existing code analysis and enhancement, mostly for stored procedures and ad-hoc SQL statements. I suspect a lot of people do the same thing as well, so I am really interested in learning how you do it. That’s the main purpose of this post. This post is tagged with Oracle, Sql Server, and MySQL, as the principals should be the same for all platforms.

Let me share with you how I do it. Notice that I look at table/column statistics and indexes in almost all the steps below. Therefore I purposely left them out in the discussion.

1. I always talk to the original author or the current owner of the code, asking him/her to walk me through it. I listen mostly, trying to understand why s/he writes code this way. I may ask a few questions, just to help me understand. I almost never do any lecturing at this stage. If the code is a stored procedure, I ask the author or …

Here is some of my thoughts on migrating MySQL to Sql Server. It came out of an email discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on migrating to a different database platform, not just MySQL to Sql Server.

I actually thought about writing a white paper or even a course on migrating from MySQL to Sql Server, but never got the time to do it. Sometimes a project doing similar things can serve as a launchpad for this endeavour, but that never came along, at least not yet. I am very interested in database interoperability field though. I’ve done MySQL and Oracle admin in the past and have published some MySQL and Oracle stuff in blogs. I have much better technical skills on Sql Server than any other RDBMS platforms, primarily because I’ve worked on it longer.

Here are some of my thoughts. I think most of it applies equally on migration from Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Postgresql, etc., to Sql Server, or the other way around. It …

I've known about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views (or system tables) in SQL Server for a while, but I just leared recently that they are actually part of the SQL-92 standard and supported on other database platforms.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views provide meta data information about the tables, columns, and other parts of your database. Because the structure of these tables are standardized you can write SQL statements that work on various database platforms.

For example suppose you want to return a resultset with a list of all columns in a table called employees

SELECT table_name, column_name, is_nullable, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
WHERE table_name = 'employees'

Quite a handy feature, but it's hard to find what versions the of various database platforms started supporting this feature, here's a quick list:

• Microsoft …

I've been evaluating the latest version of the MySQL Migration Toolkit to work on migrations from SQLServer 2005 to MySQL 5.1Here are some of the things I found so far:Ease of use: Very simple and fast to get up and running - I was able to get multiple databases migrated from SQLServer to MySQL without any special setup or configuration changes. Gui is straight forward and intuitive.Took a