Migrate MySQL to SQL Server

There could be a time when your MySQL database solution evolves into a mission-critical solution. Suddenly, service level agreements for areas like security, high availability, disaster recovery, scalability, data governance, becomes an issue. Likewise, the solution may require integration with new capabilities like machine learning, data lake, graph, and in-memory computing.

Microsoft SQL Server 2017 powers your entire data estate by supporting structured and unstructured data sources. It builds on previous versions of SQL Server, which have been industry leading for four years in a row and have held a leading spot in TPC-E benchmark testing. SQL Server 2017 scales to accommodate petabytes of data through Polybase by using T-SQL over any data. SQL Server has also been the least vulnerable database over the last seven years.

When evaluating your rationale for migrating, consider the detail provided in the following sections.

Security

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) public security board, SQL Server has the lowest number of reported security vulnerabilities across the major database vendors (NSIT, 2016).

Security features provide server-side security measures that vastly simplify the process of keeping data safe from unauthorized access without the need to modify existing client applications. These features include:

• Auditing, which enables teams to monitor access and track potentially suspicious activity.
• Transparent Data Encryption, which protects data at rest at a file level.
• Row-Level Security, which enables developers to implement fine-grained access control over rows in a database table.
• Dynamic Data Masking, which enables customers to designate how much of the sensitive data to reveal with minimal impact on the application layer.
• Always Encrypted, which secures data in motion and at rest.

Performance

SQL Server holds the top:

• TPC-E performance benchmarks for transaction processing.
• TPC-H performance benchmarks for data warehousing.
• Performance benchmarks with leading business applications.

In addition, in April 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise published a new TPC-H 1TB world record with SQL Server 2017 running on Linux.

These key SQL Server 2017 features that make this possible include:

• Columnstore, which provides column-based data storage and processing to achieve up to 10 times the query performance and data compression of row-based storage.
• In-memory OLTP, which brings transaction processing to memory-optimized tables at more than 2.5 times the speed of disk-based tables.

The power of SQL Server now on Linux and Container Instances

SQL Server 2017 offers the best performance and security features, and they are now available on all supported platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Azure Container Instances.

With these capabilities available on all editions of SQL Server, organizations can choose their deployment environment by operational need rather than desired features.

The DB Best team developed a unique methodology for migrating MySQL applications to Microsoft SQL Server and proved it many times over with hundreds of customers. Being an architect and the original creator of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA), the DB Best team is THE database migration expert you can trust with your project.

Based on our vast migration experience, the DB Best team developed our in-house products Database Compare Suite and DB Best Migration Platform, which greatly complement SSMA for MySQL.

Here are the DB Best tools that we’ve developed to optimize the MySQL to SQL Server migration process.