The RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) used throughout the website is MySQL.

At first I designed the website to use SQL Server 2000 and it lasted a year. In the first version I was using a lot of stored procedures (about 200). Because I was continously adding new features on the site, I was always creating scripts to update the stored procedures to handle the new tables and new fields. Every time I was running my scripts on the production server I got errors. Every I was trying to backup the production database on my local computer I got errors. Ok I was on a shared hosting so that didn't helped. I rapidly found this very anoying so I starting to think about what I could do to solve all the problems I was having. Allthough I was a big fan of SQL Server (for using it a lot on different jobs) I started to read on MySQL. I was thinking about the day I have to switch to my own server and pay for the license... SQL Server being very expensive, MySQL was a good option.

After reading a lot on MySQL I decided to convert my SQL Server database to MySQL. I started by grabbing a copy of my production database localy and convert data from one database to another with MySQL tools. It took me a while to convert everything because some types (like blobs) gave me some difficulties. After that I started to rewrite all my stored procedures from one SQL language to another. At this time there were more than 200 procedures so It took me a while to convert every thing. After all was succesfuly converted to MySQL, I decided to create a backup of the local database to restore it on the production server. I found that the version on the production server was not accepting stored procedures... bad surprise ! I then thought about the right thing to do and I decided to extract the stored procedures from the database and put them in text files. I then rewrited my data access layer to read the procedure in the text file named like the procedure. I then realized that we canno't have procedural code (like IF, WHILE, etc) when executing a command with the text of the procedure so I had to rewrite every logic from my stored procedures to my C# code.

After all that I was ready to change my database system so I practiced a lot with production copies localy. Because of the blobs (used mostly for encrypted passwords) it took me a while to find the perfect way to convert them so after I've founded the way, I created DTS packages in SQL Server. After the process worked a couple of times I stoped the website, copied my production database localy and executed the DTS package. I them restored the new database in production and... voilà ! Everything was working fine. It was more difficult than I thought but I succeeded.