Translating between SQL Dialects for Cloud Migration

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of translating SQL dialects during cloud database migration, highlighting the limitations of existing tools and proposing new research directions to improve translation completeness.

Contribution

It introduces the problem of SQL dialect translation in cloud migration and suggests innovative research avenues with promising initial results.

Findings

Existing tools do not fully translate SQL dialects.

Manual translation becomes infeasible for large organizations.

Proposed research directions show promising preliminary outcomes.

Abstract

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.