Modern organizations must process information from numerous data sources, including applications, databases, and data warehouses, to gain trusted insights and build a sustainable competitive advantage. In a bid to quantify this, Market Pulse concluded through its survey that companies, on average, have data coming in from as many as 400 data sources, with SAP SQL Anywhere being one of them.

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Staggering! isn’t it? We know, but keep in mind that it’s still an average figure; according to the same research, many enterprises have 1,000 or more data sources that fuel their dashboards. Now, imagine extracting, validating, transforming, and converting incoming data from these sources to a defined format. It’s a tough ask, but you must perform all these steps to create a unified view of your data. And if you’re not fast enough, there’s much more to lose than gain.

Fortunately, we have an enterprise-grade data management platform to solve this conundrum. This blog will discuss why and what you need to convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server. But before that, let’s quickly touch on each of these databases.

SAP SQL Anywhere

SAP SQL Anywhere is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that stores data in rows and columns. SQL Anywhere is compatible with multiple platforms, including Windows, HP-UX, Mac OS, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX, and UNIX. Moreover, this DBMS supports standard and special database interfaces such as ODBC, ADO.NET, JDBC, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript.

SQL Anywhere can be used as an embedded database for various desktop and web applications and facilitates data management without needing database administration (DBA). You can use SQL Anywhere with minimal supervision, which sets it apart from other RDBMS. You can also use this RDBMS as a mobile and workgroup database server.

Other reasons organizations incorporate SQL Anywhere into their data stack include its enhanced data sync capabilities, advanced security with a robust 128-bit encryption that extends to files and database tables, excellent performance on a wide range of IoT platforms, and the fact that it can process large volumes of data efficiently and quickly.

ETL data to and from SAP SQL Anywhere with a native connector

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Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server is Microsoft’s version of RDBMS. Although it’s primarily used as a relational database, you can also use it as a document store as well as a graph and spatial database. SQL Server does support semi-structured and unstructured data, but the performance is not as outstanding as non-relational databases such as MongoDB. Suffice it to say it works best when used with structured data

Microsoft SQL Server has come a long way since its inception, from SQL Server v1.0, a basic 16-bit RDBMS, to SQL Server 2022 with advanced machine learning and analytics capabilities. While it may not be used with minimal DBA like SAP SQL Anywhere, Microsoft’s latest iteration of SQL Server is more Azure-enabled than ever, allowing you to leverage more cloud features easily.

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Why go from SQL Anywhere to SQL Server

Some reasons to migrate from (or convert) SQL Anywhere to SQL Server are the latter’s widespread availability, ease of use, and high performance. Unsurprisingly, 98% of the Fortune 100 prefer to use SQL Server over any other RDBMS.

Converting data in SQL Anywhere and migrating to SQL Server

On the strategic front, there could be many reasons why you would need to convert data to a particular format supported by your destination system. For example, while your organization relies on SQL Server for its data management needs, you might have several customers that use different databases, such as SAP SQL Anywhere, Amazon RDS, or even a non-relational database, to store and manage their data. Or, let’s say your organization was previously using SQL Anywhere and now, after a few years, determines that SQL Server better serves its business needs.

Both these scenarios would require the company’s IT department to do its homework with due diligence and formulate a strategy to convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server without affecting business operations. The phrase ‘without affecting business operations,’ as simple as it may sound, is of particular importance, especially since converting several database files of large sizes to a different format can quickly turn out to be a complex and tedious endeavor. Moreover, such an undertaking almost always puts data quality at high risk. There are significant chances of data loss and corruption unless you take measures to migrate your data safely and securely.

This is where automated data integration platforms come into play and streamline the entire process.

Leveraging automation to convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server

Gone are the days when companies relied on developers for their ETL/ELT projects. It’s not just the massive volumes of data; the staggering number of data sources and the data velocity renders manual data pipelines ineffective. Your business must unlock the value from data promptly to provide decision-makers with timely and updated information to make informed decisions.

Therefore, you must consider a modern data integration platform that doesn’t require you to build and maintain complex data pipelines manually. Automated solutions can convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server much faster than manual methods, saving cost, time, and effort.

Moreover, they’re less prone to errors than their manual counterparts, affirming the converted data is accurate and complete. In addition, many modern solutions come with a zero-code environment and thus can be operated by users with limited technical expertise.

Whether you want to convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server or vice versa, an automated solution will allow you to handle your data structures more effectively.

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Convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server effortlessly with Astera

Astera Centerprise is a unified data integration platform powered by automation and process orchestration. Its no-code UI and pre-built transformations simplify the entire data integration and migration journey, empowering you to transform your data as per your business requirements effortlessly.

Additionally, the platform offers several data quality features to improve data health, including data validation, profiling, and data quality rules to ensure only healthy data reaches your databases, data warehouses, and data lakes.

Astera offers native connectivity to a wide range of data sources and destinations. You can migrate data to or from SQL Anywhere without writing a single line of code.

Astera empowers you to:

• Streamline and accelerate the company-wide data integration process
• Build automated ETL/ELT pipelines in a no-code, drag-and-drop environment
• Handle large amounts of data effortlessly with an industrial-strength ETL engine
• Improve and maintain data quality
• Monitor your data at every stage of the process with Instant Data Preview

Leverage powerful automation and native connectors and convert SQL Anywhere to SQL Server with Astera. Download a free 14-day trial, or if you’d like to discuss your business use case with our data experts, call +1 888-77-ASTERA today!