Converting from FM 9 to MySQL and keep both

[messadua]

Hi All,

Here it is the starting point: Clinical research DB in FM 9 adv and FM server 9 adv both on Windows platform.

The database has 10 tables, ~ 600 variables and ~ 1000 records.

I would like to convert the entire database to MySQL for a couple of reasons:

1) Learning more about SQL

2) Being able to construct more complex queries

3) bring the Database on a *nix/LAMP system

I have read a lot of treads, many people actually ask how to do that but there are only few replies.

One of the most common is:

1) Build another DB in MySQL, corrispondent to the FM one

2) Export all the records from FM in .cvs

3) Import in MySQL (usually with the help of PHPmyAdmin)

in alternatively someones used FmPro Migrator.

I tried to look at the Migrator but it sounds quite complex (I have to use also perl scripts) so I would prefer a more straightforward way.

Beside this, I would like to let the two databases talk so that MySQL is updated every let us say 20 minutes from FM in a sort of automatic way.

I think that this can be done with ODBC and I installed successfully ODBC drivers for FM 9, but now I do not know exactly how to proceed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated !

Happy holidays )

Diego