Database migration from obsolete desktop DBMS to cloud storages is a long-term trend in IT industry. It is not surprising that many organizations consider to convert their MS Access databases to more powerful distributed systems like MySQL and its variations. Every database professional understands that data migration is a hard procedure demanding a lot of resources for complex corporate-scale warehouses. It is not affordable to run the task manually due to high risk of data loss or corruption. Fortunately, there are special tools to simplify and automate database migration from MS Access to MySQL that can process all database objects except forms and related Visual Basic code.
There are lot of solutions to convert Access to MySQL ranged from scripts for IT professionals to turn-key commercial tools that can be used by everyone. In order to find the right tool, the following features must be verified:
1) The migration tool must support all modern versions of MySQL (both on-premises and cloud) and its popular forks such as MariaDB and Percona
2) The converter must handle main database objects such as tables, data, indexes, constraints and queries
3) The product should be able not only to create new MySQL database, but also to merge or synchronize existing MySQL database with MS Access data
4) The migration tool must support converting Microsoft Access database into MySQL script file for those cases when direct connection to the target server is not available. Also, this feature gives more flexibility of migration procedure for experienced users.
5) And finally, the product must support command line arguments for scripting and scheduling the database migration procedure
One of the most efficient tools (in terms of quality to price ratio) to convert Access to MySQL has been developed by Intelligent Converters, a software vendor working in database migration and synchronization field for tears. Their converter meets all requirements listed above. Moreover, the product can migrate not only table data but also row sets of SELECT-queries. This flexible capability can be used for the following tasks.
1) Migrate particular columns with renaming: SELECT FName as FirstName, LName as LastName FROM Table1
2) Exclude from migration rows containing NULL values: SELECT * FROM Table2 WHERE not isnull(Comments)
3) Filter rows to migrate by some criteria: SELECT * FROM Table3 WHERE ID > 1000
This tool to convert Access to MySQL has intuitive user-friendly interface and comprehensive help system that makes it useful for wide range of users, not only for database professionals. The product stores all conversion settings into profile for reusing it in next run. Also, it pays special attention to conversion of Boolean values giving customers option either to convert in Microsoft style where True is -1 or in ANSI style where True is 1.
The database migration tool is supplied with trial version that converts only 50 records per table and does not convert foreign keys and views. Learn more about how to convert Access to MySQL at the official product’s page.
