Tech Question (Databases)

[Coffee Warlord]

Fat chance on this one, but has anyone ever ported an Access database to mySQL with a relative level of ease, and if so, whaddid you do?

I've yet to research it (contract project I am doing) fully, but I figure I'd see if anyone here had done it before, or knows a way to do it first.

[VPI97]

Reoccuring data dupication or one time setup?

[Router Help]

I've never done it, but for simple databases it shouldn't be too difficult. I guess I would just export the data in Access to a CSV file and import that into mySQL. I have seen tools out there that do everything for you, but I'm not sure how well they work.

[Desnudo]

What Router said. It's actually pretty easy as long as the database it's going into is simple. The main concern is filling in any blanks (rules, fields, etc.) that may exist in the gap between what the SQL DB needs and the Access DB can provide.

Depending on the complexity of the DB, it may require a lot of upfront data mapping and testing.

Edit: sometimes it's simply not possible, or feasible to import data from Access to SQL. If the SQL DB is extremely complex and the fields from Access are on a lot of different tables in the SQL DB, it is often more of a headache than it's worth.

[chinaski]

This is very handy....
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/3.51.html

Once you have the mysql odbc installed and configured, open up your db in access. Select what tables you want to export to Mysql and then goto File->Export... then export it to a ODBC Database. In this case you'll select the Mysql DSN you made during the MyODBC setup. Viola.

You can also open up your mysql tables in access. Makes for a easy little mysql editor.

[chinaski]

this explains it much better than I and with pictures!
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Export_of_Data.html