Merge MySQL and SQL Server Data Sources for Reporting

Question

We have data stored for our customers in MySQL (Web App) and other data stored in SQL Server (billing data) and now we have a need to report on this data inside our customer-facing application.

Does anyone have experience merging these two data sources? Is there an effective way to do this?

Are there existing solutions, preferably OSS, that can aggregate the data sources and allow them to be queried as though they were one (this would be ideal)?

Otherwise, without asking for the "best" solution, what is optimal in this situation? Should we merge the separate sources into one database nightly? This is the only thing I can think of off the bat, and am wondering (hoping) whether other, more elegant or robust solutions exist.

Ideally we'd be able to query the data in real-time, rather than working off of a daily upload or whatever.

Answer 1

if you want to write queries across the two db then you could link the MySQL to the SQL Server - something like this

http://coresystems.ch/en/about-us/newsroom/category/blog/how-add-linked-server-connection-mysql-mssql/

Answer 2

If you don't mind using a third party reporting engine, then, you can give DBxtra a spin, it lets you combine different databases in one single query to produce a report, it even lets you do so graphically, so you don't have to write the query yourself.