Historically I've been a MySQL advocate but I've recently been quite impressed with Postgres. This leaves me in the position of needing to migrate several MySQL databases over to Postgres -or- run two database engines in production. And, clearly, it is far more desirable to run only a single production database server.

I recently found the NPM tool NMIG and used it to successfully convert a MySQL database over to Postgres quickly and easily – once I got past the initial installation process.

Installing and Using NMIG

Here's what you need to do to use NMIG.

Pro Tip 2: Go into your source database before you start the conversion and do a count on any table with a large number of records. This gives you a checksum on the overall process (NMIG has great logs but I always prefer belt and suspenders when it comes to working with valuable data).

1. On your machine you need to have a version of NPM installed that is version 10 or later.
2. Git clone the NMIG repo to a directory on your computer.
3. Change into that directory.
4. Edit the file config/config.json and set the credentials for your source and target.
5. Make a directory named nmig_logs.
6. Run npm install to install all the dependencies.
7. Run npm run build to convert the code from TypeScript to JavaScript.
8. Run the process with a syntax like this: npm start – –conf-dir='/Users/sjohnson/Sync/coding/my_x_is_y/nmig/config' –logs-dir='/Users/sjohnson/Sync/coding/my_x_is_y/nmig/nmig_logs'

Note: Obviously you need to update your directories as needed.

Pro Tip 2: Go into your target database after the conversion and do a count on the same table and compare the results with the above.