As a customer-oriented company, we strongly believe that the quality of our services should exceed clients’ expectations at the lowest possible price. On account of this, our management team decided to have all our servers running on the open-source platform called Linux – an Operating System that has gained tremendous popularity in the last several years among desktop users, as well as impressive growth on the server market. This in turn has attracted more interest in the development of reliable and inexpensive (free, in most cases) products ranging from desktop applications and office suites to high-end database solutions.
The MSSQL and Access databases, developed by Microsoft, run exclusively on Windows-based servers, such as Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. To be fair, there are applications that could theoretically provide MSSQL and Access support under Linux with questionable results and none of those meet our quality standards.
The alternative our company offers is MySQL – the fast, cross-platform database from ‘MySQL AB’. Its portability means that you can use it on a variety of Operating Systems – Windows, Linux, Unix, Apple XServe, IBM mainframe, and many more. If you have already developed your application using a MSSQL or an Access database, we can recommend you the following three options for conversion to MySQL:
Option 1: MSSQL2MySQL (http://www.kofler.cc/mysql/mssql2mysql.html) – this is a VB application that has been designed by Michael Kofler, the author of “The Definitive Guide to MySQL”. You can download it with a nice graphical front-end as well, select the input and the output options and start the conversion process with a few clicks. Please read the homepage for limitations and for MSSQL features that are not supported.
Option 2: Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS). Microsoft has included a data manipulation tool within the SQL server. It provides options for data export in various formats and systems. For more information on how to use this feature, please refer to these documents from Microsoft.com:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917688.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345120(SQL.90).aspx
Option 3: Similar to Microsoft DTS, Access has its own tool for table export in many formats (including ODBC). All you need to do here is right-click the table in Access and select ‘Export’. A new wizard will appear, guiding you through the conversion process.
