Translating between SQL Dialects for Cloud Migration
Ran Zmigrod Salwa Alamir Xiaomo Liu
Migrations of systems from on-site premises to the cloud has been a
fundamental endeavor by many industrial institutions. A crucial component of
such cloud migrations is the transition of databases to be hosted online. In
this work, we consider the difficulties of this migration for SQL databases.
While SQL is one of the prominent methods for storing database procedures,
there are a plethora of different SQL dialects (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, etc.)
which can complicate migrations when the on-premise SQL dialect differs to the
dialect hosted on the cloud. Tools exist by common cloud provides such as AWS
and Azure to aid in translating between dialects in order to mitigate the
majority of the difficulties. However, these tools do not successfully
translate $100\%$ of the code. Consequently, software engineers must manually
convert the remainder of the untranslated database. For large organizations,
this task quickly becomes intractable and so more innovative solutions are
required. We consider this challenge a novel yet vital industrial research
problem for any large corporation that is considering cloud migrations.
Furthermore, we introduce potential avenues of research to tackle this
challenge that have yielded promising preliminary results.