----- Original Message ----- From: "j.urban" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Tony Buckley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 4:07 PM Subject: Re: Porting from MS SQL to MySQL
> > Porting a DB takes more 'than a couple of hours'. What about the written > > procedures, the security mappings, the back up and recovery procs, the > > fallback arrangements, the testing etc. > > Yes, porting a database that was written for MSSQL with no intention of > porting can be a painful proposition. However, if you have control over > how the system is developed, you can easily design the system to be > compatible with EITHER MSSQL or MySQL (the differeces are > well-documented). If you develop your system with porting in mind (ie the > original post of "they'll develop in SQLServer and port it to MySQL > later") porting should not take more than a couple of hours. You simply > choose appropriate datatypes and don't use MSSQL-specific extensions... > > I still don't agree with this. Yes you can ease the passage by considering all the issues up front but it is still not a trivial job for a database of any consequence. There is more to a database than a physical schema - what about all the administration procedures that sit around it, what about tuning the new physical implementation, what about reviewing the access paths and optimisation, what about the redevelopment of data loading scripts. As I have said in another post, it's futile arguing about it because we don't know enough about the technical situation let the business/political one. Are you seriously saying you could sit down in front a reasonably sized DB you had never seen before and understand all the business issues and pick it up and ship to a new RDBMS and platform, rewrite the document, replan what I have stated above, and get it back up and running in two hours? Perhaps I am getting too old and slow but it would take me longer :-) I am not saying it's a huge task to do any of this but whoever said, "I could do it in a couple of hours", doesn't understand the background that led to a company quoting E18k; nor do any of us, and for anything other than a very very trivial system, two hours seems inadequate. This is an area that interests me, because I directly bid for work such as this, and when tendering you usually find the bloke down the road working out of his spare bedroom that thinks he can do it for a tenner over one day. The company requesting the work then thinks that everyone else is overinflating their prices so goes cheap and pays for it big time downstream. Cheapest and quickest is rarely best. On the flip side, nor is most expensive. Tricky world init. Tony --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
