Review: MS Access to MySQL
Conversion Tools
The following appeared in the Lockergnome Web Developers newsletter on February 11, 2004.
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Access-to-MySQL, by Intelligent Converters - 2000/XP/NT4
http://www.convert-in.com/acc2sql.htm
[Convert MS Access databases to MySQL]
Access-to-MySQL is one of the easiest tools you'll find for converting your Microsoft Access
databases to MySQL. It comes in several packages, like the Standard Edition, which converts a
single database and the Professional Edition, which provides bulk database conversion. There is
also a choice of bundles that provide for example, conversion between Access and MySQL and back,
plus similar tools for conversion between Excel and MySQL. Check their website for more details.
The user interface is simple and straightforward, providing capability of logging onto the MySQL
server remotely to upload your converted database directly to the server. If your web host doesn't
allow remote server logon, or you'd just like more control over the conversion process, select the
option which creates a dump file. That file contains all the SQL insert statements necessary to
populate your MySQL database. Then you simply logon to the MySQL server and, using a tool like
PHPMyAdmin, select your dump file for processing. In a matter of minutes, you will have created
your MySQL database.
The only limitation I've found, and this is not directly related to the use of Access-to-MySQL
is that if your MS Access tables contain more than about 6,000 records, you'll have to split your
dump file into smaller chunks for processing. Otherwise, the MySQL server will choke. That's a
limitation I can live with though, considering how easy this software is to use.
CSV Importer - Free
http://codewalkers.com/seecode/175.html
[Convert a CSV (comma separated values) file to MySQL]
The other conversion tool that I found which seems to work pretty well is CSV Importer. As you
know, MS Access has a built-in tool which will export all your tables to CSV files. Beyond that,
all you need to do is unzip this file, upload the appropriate files to the web server and follow
the on-screen instructions. Note that your database and required tables must already exist on the
server in order for this software to work.
This software is just as easy to use as Access-to-MySQL, but suffers the same limitation - that of
restricting the conversion to no more than about 6,000 records at a time. It also has a small bug
whereby timestamp fields are not properly converted. You can easily get around this problem though
by executing a SQL command on the server with the following format:
ALTER old-field-name new-field-name TIMESTAMP;
For example, I have a timestamp field on one table called LastUpdateByUser, so my command would
look like:
ALTER LastUpdateByUser LastUpdateByUser TIMESTAMP;
No matter which database conversion tool you use though, you'll find that it's not as difficult to
do as you might think.
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