Re: MS SQL to MySQL 5 migration performance

[Damir Bulic]

MySQL is very fast with inserts. In our internal testing, loading data from text file wasn't significantly faster than doing extended inserts.
45 minutes for 5M rows is achievable. We got much faster transfer speeds, but this depends a lot on the network lag, and of course - size of each row.
Keep in mind two things:
1) you might run out of RAM if you are pulling data from SQL Server and inserting simultaneously
2) if you use sql inserts instead of data loading, make sure your script size is smaller than max_allowed_packet variable

And one final note - SQL Server is much faster than MySQL for complex transformations. For some things we did, it finished in seconds, while MySQL took 15 minutes or simply froze. That testing was some time ago, maybe the situation changed since.

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Damir Bulic
Spectral Core (makers of Full Convert Enterprise)