MySQL to PostgreSQL

Written by the author of pgloader — the tool named in nearly every MySQL-to-PostgreSQL migration guide. This is the free, complete version of that guidance: the plan, the tool, and the day-to-day answers, in one place.

Three questions to settle first

Before you touch a single table: what you gain, what the tool does, and what it won’t

Why migrate

Beyond licensing cost

No per-core or per-user license
Point-in-time recovery, logical replication, JSONB — in the box
Standard SQL: CTEs, window functions, grouping sets

What pgloader automates

Schema and data, one command

Catalog fetch, schema translation, casting rules
Parallel COPY, then parallel index build
Nightly re-runs for the length of the project

What still needs porting

The part no tool does for you

Stored procedures, triggers, and views
Application SQL that assumes MySQL behavior
Covered hands-on in the full course

Get the Course Read the Methodology

Real questions, PostgreSQL answers

The MySQL questions developers actually search for

UTF-8 all the way through How to reset AUTO_INCREMENT in MySQL? Which MySQL data type to use for storing boolean values? Why did my queries break after migrating — is PostgreSQL case-sensitive? How do I handle MySQL's 0000-00-00 zero dates in PostgreSQL? How does MySQL's ENUM type migrate to PostgreSQL? What's the PostgreSQL equivalent of MySQL's LAST_INSERT_ID()? Should I use field 'datetime' or 'timestamp'?

See the Full Migration Checklist

Ready to leave MySQL behind for good?

This is one piece of a bigger method — pgloader, pg_auto_failover, and the stored-procedure porting no tool automates for you — built for developers making exactly this move.