Migrating an MS Access application to MySQL

Migrating an MS Access database to MySQL is only half the job. A lot of people think that if you put the data into MySQL, everything is going to be super-fast. But no; you will usually see some improvement in data access speed in some areas, but in others, it may even be slower than before.

Unless you modify the application to properly leverage the data processing power of the MySQL server, you still only have a container for the data, and MS Access is still processing the data. In this section, we are going to move the processing of data to the server by sending requests for data and getting the results only, which we will then use in the application.

You do not have to completely migrate an application before it can be used. You can do parts of it as required, so you will usually concentrate on specific areas that are slow; maybe a report is taking too long to run, a screen is slow, or updating records on a specific form is frustrating...