About once a year I need to migrate a medium-sized web application using MySQL to Oracle.

Usually it’s to prepare a successful intranet application for a move to a formally supported production environment - and in Silicon Valley, that usually means Oracle.

I was apologizing to Monty at OSCON this year about my latest migration project away from MySQL.

His surprising response was, “It’s not a bad thing. I don’t mind hearing about conversions because successful migrations demonstrate that people don’t have to worry about database lock-in.”

Here’s some notes on doing migrations.

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