Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Getting data out of SQL Server in a MariaDB friendly way.

I know what you are thinking "Oh my, it's that time again, Karlsson insist that data should get out of some other database and into MariaDB. What is he up to this time?" and that is exactly right, this time data is coming out of SQL Server, out of that expensive, closed source, Windows-only software and into the lightweight, fast and cost effective MariaDB.

I have already shown how this works when getting data out of Oracle in releasing MyOraDump, so inline with that the corresponding program to get data out of SQL Server is called MyMSSQLDump and it has features along same same lines as MyOraDump. To connect to SQL Server (or Sybase, but this I haven't tested) I use FreeTDS, which is a nice Open Source SQL Server / Sybase driver. The output formats supported are MySQL (i.e. A file with (INSERT INTO...), MSSQL (same as MySQL format but aligned for MSSQL), JSON, JSON Array (similar to JSON but all data in one array) and CSV. All formats are very flexible and the common SQL Server / Sybase datatypes are supported.

As usual, the code is written in C and use autotools for building. I have only tested building it on CentOS (6 and 7) so far, but there is nothing magic to it so it should work on other platforms too. Download it from sourceforge.

Happy SQL'ing
/Karlsson