Fast growing companies find it difficult to use of old desktop database management systems like Microsoft Access for their needs. This is the reason of why database administrators consider moving data to more powerful and reliable systems such as MySQL.Here is the step by step guidelines on Microsoft Access to MySQL database migration.
Top Reasons for Microsoft Access to MySQL Migration
MySQL has many advantages toward to MS Access, below is list of most important of them.
Deployment: MySQL can actually be used as back-end for MS Access that means users can use MySQL as a data storage and Microsoft Access as interface for nice user-friendly applications. On another hand, MySQL is the best solution to integrate database with web servers like Apache. Developers can work with MySQL on any modern script languages like PHP, Perl, Python etc. MySQL components are free and can be accessed via Internet browsers in order to provide platform independence.
Multi-user access. Microsoft Access limits data sharing on file-level while MySQL can handle simultaneous users in client-server architecture and grant users more control over the database.
Security.Microsoft Access offers password protection and user-level security, however both of these options could be easily broken by uncertified users. MySQL server has strong security system based on grants permissions and roles for relational DBMS.
Cost.Microsoft Access is a commercial application. MySQL is open source database management system with a lot of free tools and frameworks. Switching to MySQL that can definitely reduce total cost of the ownership(TCO) for the database.
Approaches to Database Migration
The most straight forward way is to extract the data from the source database, convert it to the destination format and load it into MySQL. There are some other options to implement this migration listed below, some of them require ODBC connection to MySQL via Connector/ODBC driver.
Use Microsoft Access to Export Data
This approach includes exporting MS Access data as a text file and importing it into MySQL using ‘LOAD DATA’ option or mysql import tool. There is no special software needed to use this option.Even if there is no MySQL client in the system, just create data file and transfer to MySQL machine. The only manual pre-processing task of this approach is MySQL tables must be manually created before data is loaded.
Generate MySQL Scripts
Another option of Microsoft Access to MySQL database migration is to use a tool for reading the source tables and converting them into MySQL script. Those scripts should contain SQL-statements to create tables, indexes, constraints and to fill tables with data.Then database administrator can load the resulting script files to MySQL via the console client or phpMyAdmin.
Use commercial tools
This is the simplest way to migrate databases from Microsoft Access to MySQL. Special tools can run the entire process with just a few clicks of mouse button. Command line support may help to script and schedule the database migration. One of such tools is developed by Intelligent Converters, software company working in this field since 2001.
Learn more about Microsoft Access to MySQL converter at https://www.convert-in.com/access-to-mysql.htm
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