Switching Teams: Moving an Application from MySQL to PostgreSQL
Presentation from Open Source Bridge 2013
SQL is an ISO standard, so you should just be able to switch backend databases, right? Sadly, while standards help, real life applications almost always use version specific syntax and functions. Five years into the development of our application, we started thinking that a different database backend would better meet our future needs. This is the story of why we choose Postgres and Open Source, how and why we switched, what worked, what didn’t, what was easy and what was hard. The conversion of our user generated data from a mixture of unknown and unrecorded character sets to consistent UTF-8 added some interesting twists to our journey.
While each application is different, this presentation will give you the information you need to decide whether switching backends is right for your project and some tools to get you started. Although we switched from MySQL to PostgreSQL, most of the information applies to any SQL database. This talk will also be useful to people who have been thinking about switching backends for future projects or working on a project with an unfamiliar SQL dialect.
This presentation mostly covers converting the scheme and data for use with Postgres.