PostgreSQL and MySQL are well known among database professionals as powerful and extremely popular open source DBMS. Both database management systems have huge communities of fans and are supplied with a lot of data management frameworks. Despite of this fact, PostgreSQL is better choice for building or deploying big and complicated data warehouses due to some its benefits missing in MySQL:
- Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL is fully compliant with the SQL standard
- It supports such complex types as multi-dimensional arrays, spatial, etc
- PostgreSQL implements both synchronous and asynchronous replication
- It has multiple concepts of indexing (B-Tree, Expression, Full-Text Search, GiST and GIN)
- It supports sophisticated user-defined types. Besides basic support of user-defined types similar to MySQL, PostgreSQL offers object-oriented features including inheritance. You can define object-level types with methods and attributes, allowing for more advanced data modeling and encapsulation.
These advantages are the reason why many companies migrate their databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The process of MySQL to PostgreSQL migration often runs according to extract-transform-load (ETL) concept that includes the following stages:
- MySQL table definitions are exported as CREATE-statements
- Those statements are converted with respect to safe type mapping, naming rules and default values validation of PostgreSQL
- The converted statements are imported into the destination database
- MySQL data is exported into comma separated values (CSV) files as temporary storage
- Those CSV files are transformed according to PostgreSQL rules for acceptable values and text representation of particular data types
- The resulting CSV data is loaded into PostgreSQL database
- MySQL views, stored procedures and triggers are extracted in form of CREATE-statements and the source code
- Those statements and source code are transformed according to PostgreSQL dialect of SQL and loaded into the target database
This brief introduction on MySQL to PostgreSQL database migration proves that the process can take a lot of time when doing it manually. Also, there is a risk of data loss or corruption due to human errors. That’s why it is reasonable to use special migration tools for automating MySQL to PostgreSQL migration, especially for large corporate-scale databases.
Intelligent Converters, a software provider specializing in data conversion field, developed one of the most popular tools for MySQL to PostgreSQL database migration. It has outstanding performance because it does not use any middleware libraries or components for reading or writing data.
MySQL to PostgreSQL converter supports all versions of source and target database management systems running on Linux/Unix/Windows platforms including such variations as MariaDB, Percona, Heroku, Amazon RDS and Google Could. The product supports command line for scripting and scheduling purposes. Other features of MySQL to PostgreSQL converter:
- filters particular records for conversion through ‘Select’ queries
- customizes tables while converting (rename, change type and attributes or exclude columns from migration)
- merges or synchronizes PostgreSQL database with MySQL data
- stores conversion settings into profile for reuse in next sessions
Finally, the product can export MySQL database into SQL script for those cases when direct connection to PostgreSQL server is not available. Later the resulting script can be imported into the target DBMS using pgAdmin or psql tools.
Visit official site of Intelligent Converters to learn more about their MySQL to PostgreSQL database migration tool.
