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periodically transfer data to Azure

Proposed periodically transfer data to Azure

  • Tuesday, April 10, 2012 12:09 PM
     
     
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    What (lightweight) tool can I use to periodically (daily)  transfer data from local mysql and Excel to Azure?

    Thanks in advance,

    GJ

     

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  • Tuesday, April 10, 2012 4:00 PM
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    Hi Gert,

    I am not sure if there are any automated ways that would allow you to transfer your data from mysql / Excel to SQL Azure, however, hopefully I can help point you in the right direction to get some of this going yourself.

    The first step would be to create a process that will export your data into a common format.  Perhaps something like a tab delimited file.  There are a ton of examples on the web on how to do this from MySQL and I think something like the OpenXML SDK or with an OleDbConnection would work to get the data from Excel. 

    From there you could use the bulk copy utility to load the data from your file into SQL Azure.  Here is an example: 

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/05/21/10014019.aspx

    If you are stuck on this, feel free to contact me directly at  liam.cavanagh AT microsoft.com and I can try to help a little more.

    Liam

    Sr. Program Manager, SQL Azure and Sync Framework - http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync/

     
  • Wednesday, April 11, 2012 6:34 AM
     
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    I agree to Liam there is no readymade tool for same.

    A quick way i can think of is

    - Create  a SQL package to read data from Excel / Access and Write to local SQL Server

    - Setup a DataSync to move data from local SQL Server to Azure SQL. , if it needed periodically OR use bulk copy as suggested by Liam.

    The additional benifit with this option is, you can have a SQL job which can call the package periodically and Data Sync can take care of moving data from local server to Azure.

     
  • Wednesday, April 11, 2012 8:08 AM
     
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    I would suggest to use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)… it is not a lightweight tool but is the correct tool to use for that purpose. I have used it to transfer data from OnPrem to Azure creating a DTSx package, it can be as simple as just "export" data or complex if you need to transform some information (or adapt data types). SSIS can manage different data sources as OleDB and Excel.

    Then I have deployed the package to an OnPrem SQL Server instance and scheduled the transfers using SQL Server Agent. It is the most robust aproach.

    Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/es-es/library/ms141026.aspx