Well, for various reasons you may be willing (wanting) to place a part of your stuff on Microsoft Azure and part on the Amazon Cloud.

In fact it is a repetition of the same story of the bygone era, some data on Microsoft platform, some on Oracle etc.

Sooner or later you want to move data from one to the other.

Of course there are the integration tools that can handle this. But there are others who specialize in migration of data.

Microsoft went relational with its flagship SQL Server 2008 ported out to the clouds with SQL Azure. Soon Amazon followed with its relational offering based on MySQL.

Now Microsoft has released SQL Server Migration Assistant 2008 for MySQL v1.0 in CTP1. This is a toolkit that you may use to migrate your MySQL data to SQL Server 2008 and SQL Azure. This is a nice one way bridge to SQL Azure from Amazon's MySQL.

Every database vendor has his own migration tool to take away data from a rival. There is the Oracle SQL Developer, there are migration wizards in Sybase's SQL Anywhere not counting the similar tools for the Big Blue. Of course there are other third party vendors using their skills to migrate from anywhere to anywhere.

All told it has never been easier to move data along the internet highway, nor the cloud jet way.

You may download SSMA 2008

and give it a spin. Well there is another toolkit if you want to migrate to SQL Server 2005 at the same site.

Note: SSMA 2008 for MySQL v1.0 CTP1 is designed to work with MySQL 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1 and all editions of SQL Server 2008 or SQL Azure.

If you are interested in migrating data, read all of my migration related articles for free on my blog here.

All so, if you are interested in Business Intelligence, read my no brainer SQL Server Business intelligence books here and here.

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