News

Microsoft Woos MySQL Users with Migration Tool

• By David Ramel
• 01/12/2010

Microsoft fired another salvo in the database wars by announcing a new toolkit to help users migrate their databases from MySQL to SQL Server -- or SQL Azure, the new cloud offering.

In a Data Platform Insider blog posting, Erika Sommer yesterday announced the release of a Community Technology Preview of an addition to the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) program. Called CTP version 1.0 for MySQL, the tool "provides an assessment of migration efforts as well as automates schema and data migration from MySQL to SQL Server."

Two versions of the tool are available. The Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant 2005 for MySQL v1.0 CTP1 is aimed at MySQL users wishing to migrate to SQL Server 2005, and the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant 2008 for MySQL v1.0 CTP1 targets users who want to move to SQL Server 2008 or SQL Azure, part of the cloud-based Windows Azure platform (the SQL Azure Team Blog announced the latter offering last week).

Microsoft is also using the cloud to court MySQL users who don’t want to migrate, having earlier reported that Azure would support MySQL databases, and its oft-used partners, Apache and PHP.

Amazon has also opened up its cloud-based service, EC2, to MySQL users.

Both of the new SSMA previews require the following:

• Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1 or a later version.
• The Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or a later version.
• MySQL Connector/ODBC v5.1.
• 1 GB RAM.