[stracy2]

Can a custom (forum) import, import from “any SQL” database or does it have to be an “MySQL” database?

The high level custom import documentation here states “to setup an import from any SQL database”.

And the deeper link here state “to setup an import from any MySQL database.”

[Robin W]

I’ve always taken it to mean a MySQL database.

so you are probably looking at converting eg

https://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/guide-to-migrating-from-sql-server-to-mysql/

[alicesmith23]

Fine, but how we can convert the database from one platform to another platform? It’s a very informative question? I m working on a project and i have no alternative database path.

[stracy2]

As Robin pointed out (thank you), “My SQL Workbench” is likely the tool or at least a starting tool. I’ve tried its “Migration Wizard” going from a MS SQL database, but unfortunately the wizard errors out on MS ntext fields that contain 4 byte unicode characters (the error is “Inserting Data: Incorrect string value:” on the MySql side) despite both src and dst database fields having utf8mb4 as the character set, and even ensuring all of MySQL database connections are utf8mb as per here.

Since it is not too practical to try and filter out the offending 4 byte unicode chars, so as an alternative now I’m trying saving the src data to CSV and importing CSV on the MySQL side – but apparently the CVS libraries disagree on encoding/decoding – the dst table ends up with more records than the source, not sure who is a fault.

[Robin W]

I always find this stuff really annoying – what should be simple takes hours to achieve – hope you get sorted, and if you do, please post what you did here to help others