As I switched to OpenOffice for home use almost a year ago, I didn’t have any means to access my old MS Access databases anymore. I’ve been looking some time on how to migrate the data over to MySQL, but only now I found out about a nice, stable and free tool to work that out easily.

At first I tried several downloadable utilities, but all of those have limitations, and you actually need to buy the full versions to have something easy to work out. In theory, one should be able to link to MySQL through ODBC but that driver is buggy as hell (at least Access crashes when using it).

I came to the point where I was willing to spend some money on a full working piece of software, but luckily I Googled some more and found this nice tutorial on migrating Access to MySQL. You could do it manually as described in the beginning of the article, if you want to stay Free, or you could make some sacrifices and download and install the free version of the DBManager software and click you through an easy import wizzard.

While I was at it, I added a database with the lists of my cd’s which was still stored in an Excel file. Now the next logical step could be to rebuild my front ends in OpenOffice Base, but that one is still beta, quite buggy and, foremost, painfully slow.