What's the best way to migrate a Django DB from SQLite to MySQL?

I need to migrate my db from sqlite to mysql, and the various tools/scripts out there are too many for me to easily spot the safest and most elegant solution.

This seemed to me nice http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/14/ but appears to be 3 years since getting an update which is worrying..

Can you recommend a solution that is known to be reliable with Django 1.1.1 ?

Solution 1:

Execute:

python manage.py dumpdata > datadump.json

Next, change your settings.py to the mysql database.

Finally:

python manage.py loaddata datadump.json

Solution 2:

After some hard searching I got several problems that I hope future answer looking people will find useful.

my formula is

1. python manage.py dumpdata > datadump.json
2. Change settings.py to your mysql
3. Make sure you can connect on your mysql (permissions,etc)
4. python manage.py migrate --run-syncdb

5. Exclude contentype data with this snippet in shell

   python manage.py shell

   from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType ContentType.objects.all().delete() quit()

6. python manage.py loaddata datadump.json

Hope that will help you!

Solution 3:

This is a neater way to avoid the ContentType issues described elsewhere:

./manage.py dumpdata --exclude contenttypes --exclude auth.permission --exclude sessions --indent 2 > dump.json

Then:

./manage.py loaddata dump.json

Solution 4:

A (fuller) list of the steps I needed for moving from sqlite to MySQL, YMMV:

1. python manage.py dumpdata > datadump.json
2. Make sure you can connect on your mysql (permissions, etc)
3. Make sure you HAVE PRIVILEGES to modify FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS (I had to install and run my own private instance of mysql for that)
4. Make sure InnoDB engine is NOT used (use MyISAM in every table) or the next step won't work (failing silently)!
5. Relax validation by this command (this won't take effect in InnoDB): SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;
6. Load django_site.sql table separately (if using contrib.sites)
7. Change settings.py to your new mysql
8. python manage.py migrate --run-syncdb
9. Fix syncdb errors errors by tinkering with the code in /migrations directories of your Django apps and the DB tables as necessary
10. Exclude contentype data with this snippet (can put it in the main urls.py module): from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType ContentType.objects.all().delete() quit()
11. If need editing json data have to prettify it first: cat datadump.json | python -m json.tool > datadump_pretty.json
12. python manage.py loaddata datadump.json
13. Fix any data truncation issues
14. Add timezone data to the database: mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -D mysql -P 1234 -u root -p --protocol=tcp mysql -P 1234 -u root -p -e "flush tables" --protocol=tcp
15. Test the site is working without submitting any data
16. SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;
17. Test the rest