Tips on helping to move to MS SQL from MySQL

Question

I have been interested in database developing for some time now and decided that MS SQL has a lot to offer in terms of T-SQL and generally much more functionality (not saying that Oracle or Postgres don't have that).

I would like to know:

1. What are the big paradigm changes I should expect to see?
2. How much effort do "regular" companies put into developing their database (for transactions, triggers, events, data cleansing, ETL)?
3. What can I expect from the inner-workings of MS SQL developer teams and how they interact with the .NET application developers?

I hope I have phrased my question correctly. I am not very clued-up about the whole .NET scene.

Answer 1

Can't answer #1 as I've never worked with mysql but I'll take a shot at #2 and #3.

This tends to depend on the size of the database and/or the size (or professionalism) of the company. Companies with large databases with many users spend a great deal of time indeed making sure that the database both has integrity and is performance tuned. They woudl lose customers if they did not. We have 6 people who do nothing but ETL work and 5 dbas who tune and manage the databases and database servers as well as many many developers who write t-sql code.

As far as #3, in good companies these people work together very well as a team. In bad companies, there is often tension between the two groups and each uses the other group as a scapegaoat for whatever problems occur. I work with a bunch of great .net developers. They respect my database expertise as I respect their .net expertise and we caonsult each other on design issues and tuning issues and in general any issue that needs input from both sides.

Answer 2

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?60,124480,124480 details using linked servers from SQL Server to MySQL to do the actual data migration.

Answer 3

Apache DDLUtils should be able to help. You can reverse engineer the schema into a common DDL and also export the data to a flat file. Import it in afterward.