Importing data from other database systems

There are countless database management systems that are used in enterprise environments. SQL Server has built-in tools that can connect to some of those for data import. The availability of such a data source is usually dependent on the drivers, which have to be installed on the SQL Server. Microsoft provides a tool named the SQL Server Migration Assistant, which can help with such migration and data acquisition from several different types of databases. Those types include the following:

• MySQL
• DB2
• Microsoft Access
• SAP
• Oracle

Depending on the database type, the SQL Server Migration assistant may require more tools or binaries to be installed on your system. If we consider a simple scenario of importing a Microsoft Access database, we would need to install Microsoft Data Access Components, or Microsoft Access 2016 runtime to be able to connect to an Access database file:

While importing data from Microsoft Access, you need to take care of several important transformations regarding the data types, indexes, keys, and other aspects of the data stored in the Microsoft Access format. This tool is very helpful for making many of the transformations on your behalf as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

Once you have reviewed the structure, you can synchronize the database into the selected tables:

Importing data from other DMBS systems may be much more complex, and this tool is only a basic exploratory tool to see how the data is actually structured and how the migration project may appear.