Being an inheritor of well-known Interbase, Firebird is true free open-source cross-platforming relational database management system developed for years by community of enthusiasts. It is one of the ideal solutions for small and medium size databases. On the other hand, Firebird misses such capabilities of advanced DBMS as integrated replication, full-text search, point-in-time recovery that may be required for large and complicated databases.
Those weaknesses of Firebird are the reason why many organizations enter into database migration to more powerful DBMS:
- High level of security (MySQL is one of the safest DBMS on the market)
- Comprehensive support of transactions (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable and row-level locking)
- Perfect integration with web applications (MySQL and PHP became the most popular open-source development platform for plenty of web sites)
With advantages listed above, MySQL is also free and open-source.
Firebird to MySQL database migration made by human is a complicated and tedious procedure, especially for large data warehouses. This is because of differences between the two DBMS that must be handles properly:
- intelligent processing of Firebird specific data types, for example “blob sub_type 1”
- different syntax of escaping strings in DML queries like ‘INSERT INTO’
- string concatenation operator || used in Firebird must be properly translated into MySQL function CONCAT
In view of the challenges of Firebird to MySQL database migration, it is reasonable to use some special tools to automate the task, to avoid errors and eliminate risk of data loss. There are number of such migration tools available on the market that do the job with a bit of clicks of mouse button.
One of these software solutions is Firebird to MySQL converter produced by Intelligent Converters. The main advantage of the product is that it does not require live instance of Firebird server or any other 3rd party installations. Other valuable benefits of Firebird to MySQL converter are:
- schemas, data, indexes and constraints are processes carefully
- all versions of MySQL are supported, including MariaDB and Percona as well as SAAS forks
- option to edit definition of the target table (update name, type and other attributes of any column, remove it from migration)
- option to merge and to synchronize existing MySQL database with Firebird data (insert- and update-synchronization are supported)
- option to export Firebird database into MySQL script (for those cases where direct connection to MySQL server is not available)
- command line support allows automate and schedule the migration
Visit official site of Intelligent Converters to get more information about Firebird to MySQL converter.
