I may be gearing up for a job change at work. I am an avid MySQL user and have successfully maintained many large complicated databases using it. My employer uses MS SQL Server. Are there any major differences that I should educate myself on prior to jumping in head first. I am assuming that it will be very similar once I get the logistics of the program down... but is there anything out of the ordinary that is going to surprise me?
It does depend what your going to be asked to do, but generally SQL is SQL so the basics of query writing will be similar, just dont expect MySQL SQL tricks to work the same way. If you havent used Stored Procedures on MySQL I would say that would be your biggest change. Jen
There are several features of MS-SQL that are not available in MySQL. Whether you will need to use them will depend on how the shop you are going to is set up. As JenniP stated, for the most part SQL is SQL. There are a few commands in MySQL that are specific to it, and there are some commands that are just in MS-SQL (these are known as T-SQL or Transact SQL). In some cases there is an equivalent function in both, the syntax to call it (and the name) might change. Do you know what size databases you would be working with? Things you might need to work on if you haven't before (some in MySQL, some not, some in MySQL >= 5.0): Stored Procedures User Defined Functions Views Table Indexes Cursors Triggers Foreign Keys Native XML Datatype Replication Features It will also depend on whether your job will be more db design or db administration.
To give a bit more information, the databases I will be dealing with are enormous in size. I would venture that some of the primary DBs contain > 1MM rows of data. The primary role I would be serving would be to take the raw data from the databases and create reports/trending based on management needs. I don't use any reporting or charting tools currently with the MySQL databases... just simple importing data to excel to create charts, etc has served my purpose well in the past... and I believe that is the format that most managers at my employer receive their reports in. Any recommendations for this type of querying would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your info folks, you've given me some more things to educate myself on prior to getting my feet wet.