Warehouses and Lakes
Databases

How to load data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data into Redshift within minutes.

TL;DR

This can be done by building a data pipeline manually, usually a Python script (you can leverage a tool as Apache Airflow for this). This process can take more than a full week of development. Or it can be done in minutes on Airbyte in three easy steps:

  1. set up Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
  2. set up Redshift as a destination connector
  3. define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

Microsoft SQL Server Consultants help companies choose the best business software solutions for their needs. Microsoft SQL Server Consultants help businesses resolve questions and issues, provide businesses with reliable information resources, and, ultimately, make better decisions on the software most appropriate for their unique needs. Consultants are available to help on call and can connect remotely to businesses’ computers to upgrade outdated editions of SQL servers to bring functions up to date for improved productivity.

What is Redshift

A fully managed data warehouse service in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, Amazon Redshift is designed for storage and analysis of large-scale datasets. Redshift allows businesses to scale from a few hundred gigabytes to more than a petabyte (a million gigabytes), and utilizes ML techniques to analyze queries, offering businesses new insights from their data. Users can query and combine exabytes of data using standard SQL, and easily save their query results to their S3 data lake.

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Prerequisites

  1. A Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
  2. A Redshift account.
  3. An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that consolidates and streamlines the process of extracting and loading data from multiple data sources to data warehouses. It offers pre-built connectors, including Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) and Redshift, for seamless data migration.

When using Airbyte to move data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift, it extracts data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) using the source connector, converts it into a format Redshift can ingest using the provided schema, and then loads it into Redshift via the destination connector. This allows businesses to leverage their Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data for advanced analytics and insights within Redshift, simplifying the ETL process and saving significant time and resources.

Step 1: Set up Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) as a source connector

1. Open the Airbyte platform and navigate to the "Sources" tab on the left-hand side of the screen.

2. Click on the "Add Source" button and select "MSSQL - SQL Server" from the list of available connectors.

3. Enter a name for the connector and click on the "Next" button.

4. Enter the required credentials for your MSSQL - SQL Server database, including the server name, port number, database name, username, and password.

5. Test the connection to ensure that the credentials are correct and the connection is successful.

6. Select the tables or views that you want to replicate from the MSSQL - SQL Server database.

7. Choose the replication mode that you want to use, either full or incremental.

8. Configure any additional settings, such as the replication frequency and the maximum number of rows to replicate.

9. Click on the "Create Source" button to save the configuration and start the replication process.

10. Monitor the replication process and troubleshoot any issues that may arise using the Airbyte platform's monitoring and logging features.

Step 2: Set up Redshift as a destination connector

1. First, log in to your Airbyte account and navigate to the "Destinations" tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
2. Click on the "Add Destination" button and select "Redshift" from the list of available connectors.
3. Enter your Redshift database credentials, including the host, port, database name, username, and password.
4. Choose the schema you want to use for your data in Redshift.
5. Select the tables you want to sync from your source connector to Redshift.
6. Map the fields from your source connector to the corresponding fields in Redshift.
7. Choose the sync mode you want to use, either "append" or "replace."
8. Set up any additional options or filters you want to use for your sync.
9. Test your connection to ensure that your data is syncing correctly.
10. Once you are satisfied with your settings, save your configuration and start your sync.

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data to Redshift

Once you've successfully connected Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) as a data source and Redshift as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

  1. Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
  2. Choose your source: Select Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
  3. Select your destination: Choose Redshift from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
  4. Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
  5. Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) objects you want to import data from towards Redshift. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
  6. Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
  7. Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
  8. Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your Redshift data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data.

Use Cases to transfer your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data to Redshift

Integrating data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

  1. Advanced Analytics: Redshift’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) alone.
  2. Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL), syncing to Redshift allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
  3. Historical Data Analysis: Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) has limits on historical data. Syncing data to Redshift allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
  4. Data Security and Compliance: Redshift provides robust data security features. Syncing Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data to Redshift ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
  5. Scalability: Redshift can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data.
  6. Data Science and Machine Learning: By having Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) data in Redshift, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
  7. Reporting and Visualization: While Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to Redshift, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) table that needs to be converted to a Redshift table, Airbyte can do that automatically.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, this tutorial has shown you how to:

  1. Configure a Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) account as an Airbyte data source connector.
  2. Configure Redshift as a data destination connector.
  3. Create an Airbyte data pipeline that will automatically be moving data directly from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift after you set a schedule

With Airbyte, creating data pipelines take minutes, and the data integration possibilities are endless. Airbyte supports the largest catalog of API tools, databases, and files, among other sources. Airbyte's connectors are open-source, so you can add any custom objects to the connector, or even build a new connector from scratch without any local dev environment or any data engineer within 10 minutes with the no-code connector builder.

We look forward to seeing you make use of it! We invite you to join the conversation on our community Slack Channel, or sign up for our newsletter. You should also check out other Airbyte tutorials, and Airbyte’s content hub!

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

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Replicating data from Microsoft SQL Server to Redshift with Airbyte provides faster analytical queries. Data analytics need dedicated compute resources. When processing terabytes to petabytes of data for the purpose of analytics, SQL server may be slow and expensive due to its per socket, CPU-based billing model. Moving to Redshift significantly reduces processing time and running costs.

Airbyte Cloud allows you to seamlessly move data between any data source and destination, including popular databases, data warehouses, and business applications. Airbyte's database replication to datawarehouses uses change data capture (CDC) with checkpointing capabilities and scheduling to simply pick up from where you left off.

Airbyte is like a data engineer's secret weapon! With its powerful capabilities, you can also set up various Data Integrations including Postgres to Redshift and Postgres to BigQuery, among many other connections. It's the perfect tool to supercharge your data engineering projects and make them shine!

This tutorial will take you through the critical steps to set up Airbyte Cloud and replicate data from your SQL Server instance running in Amazon RDS to Redshift.

Prerequisites

Below are the prerequisite tools you’ll need to get started on replicating up your SQL Server data to Redshift.

  1. You’ll need to get an Airbyte Cloud account to replicate the data. You can sign up for Airbyte Cloud here.
  2. You will need an instance of SQL Server that you can connect to remotely. You can get a hosted SQL Server instance through Amazon RDS at the link here.
  3. You will also need an instance of Amazon Redshift that you can connect to remotely. You can get started with Amazon Redshift by creating an AWS account at the link here.

Step 1: Set up SQL Server as the Airbyte source

In this example, we will configure an existing SQL Server instance hosted on AWS as our Airbyte Cloud Source. Log into AWS and go to Amazon RDS > > Connectivity and Security to make note of your endpoint and port that will be required to configure Airbyte.

Note: Ensure that the DB instance's public accessibility is set to Yes to allow external connections. To modify the Public access setting, see Modifying an Amazon RDS DB instance.

Next, we will need to update the security group just created by going to EC2 > Security Groups > Create security group. Give the group a name and description. In the Inbound Rules section, select MSSQL as the type and add ‘34.106.109.131/32’ (Airbyte Cloud IP) in the Source section and add the rule. Next, add another rule with MSSQL type and choose ‘My IP’ from the drop-down. This will allow you to connect to your instance from your local machine.

Once the security group has been updated, you can add some data to your instance. You can use any database management tool you prefer. Now that you have your SQL Server instance set up to allow connections from Airbyte Cloud,  you can begin configuring the Airbyte Source. Login and create a new connection and select Microsoft SQL Server as the source type and give it a name. You can find more information about the SQL Server Airbyte connector at the link here. Enter the host, the port, the database name (airbyte in this case), and the user and password you used when setting up SQL Server. Once configured, click on set up the destination.

Step 2: Set up Redshift as the Airbyte destination

To set up Redshift as your Airbyte destination you will have to allow connections from Airbyte Cloud to your cluster. Login to AWS and go to Amazon Redshift > Clusters > and make a note of the endpoint for your cluster.

Your endpoint will be in the format :/. Make a note of these three values required to configure the Airbyte Cloud.

Next, you will also need to edit the inbound rules for the security group for your Redshift cluster. You can find the security group for your Redshift cluster in the Network and security settings section.  

Once you know which security group is being used by Redshift, go back to EC2 > Security Groups > . In the Inbound Rules section, select Redshift as the type and add ‘34.106.109.131/32’ (Airbyte Cloud IP) in the Source section and add the rule.

Next, from the Redshift cluster page, go to Actions > Modify publicly accessible settings.

In the pop-up, select the Enable option and save changes. You can confirm that your cluster is publicly accessible by going to Properties > Network and security settings which should now be listed as Enabled.

To set up your destination,  select Redshift as your destination type and give it a name. You can find more information about the Redshift Airbyte connector at the link here. Enter the host, the port, and the database name (dev in this case), and also enter the user and password you used when creating your Redshift cluster and click on set up  Destination.

Step 3: Set up a SQL Server to Redshift connection

Once the source and destination are configured, you can access your connection settings.  You can set the Replication frequency depending on how often you want Airbyte to replicate your data.

Next, you can choose which tables to sync and set the sync frequency and the sync mode for each table individually. This example will select the customers table and set the Sync more to Incremental | Append.

You can also choose between using Raw Data or Basic Normalization. We will select Basic Normalization to set up the connection in this example. You can also choose to apply custom data transformations, but we will keep it simple by skipping the data transformation part in this example.

Once configured,  save the connection and select Sync now to run your first sync once configured. Once the sync is complete, you should see how many rows were replicated (849 in this case).

To view the replicated data, go to the Redshift Query editor for your cluster and select your database to view the tables created by Airbyte Cloud.

Clicking on a particular table will show you the schema generated by Airbyte for your data.

You can run the following query from the query pane to view your data.

You can also view the row count for your table by running the following query.

To test out the incremental sync, you can add some more rows to your SQL Server table. In this example, 10 more rows were added. Once you add some more data you can run another sync. The 10 newly added rows are replicated up to Redshift.

Conclusion

To summarize, we look at how we can replicate data from SQL Server to Redshift using Airbyte Cloud by:

  1. Configuring a SQL Server Airbyte Cloud source.
  2. Configuring a Redshift Airbyte Cloud destination.
  3. Creating an Airbyte connection that automatically replicates data from SQL Server to Redshift.
  4. Incrementally syncing SQL Server data to Redshift.

We know that development and operations teams working on fast-moving projects with tight timelines need quick answers to their questions from developers actively developing Airbyte. They also want to share their learnings with experienced community members who have "been there and done that." Join the conversation at Airbyte's community Slack Channel to share your ideas with over 1000 data engineers and help make everyone's project successful.

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

flag icon
Easily address your data movement needs with Airbyte Cloud
Take the first step towards extensible data movement infrastructure that will give a ton of time back to your data team. 
Get started with Airbyte for free
high five icon
Talk to a data infrastructure expert
Get a free consultation with an Airbyte expert to significantly improve your data movement infrastructure. 
Talk to sales
stars sparkling
Improve your data infrastructure knowledge
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get the community’s new enlightening content along with Airbyte’s progress in their mission to solve data integration once and for all.
Subscribe to newsletter

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Frequently Asked Questions

What data can you extract from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)?

MSSQL - SQL Server provides access to a wide range of data types, including:  

1. Relational data: This includes tables, views, and stored procedures that are used to store and manipulate data in a structured format.  

2. Non-relational data: This includes data that is not stored in a structured format, such as XML documents, JSON objects, and binary data.  

3. Spatial data: This includes data that is related to geographic locations, such as maps, coordinates, and spatial queries.  

4. Time-series data: This includes data that is related to time, such as timestamps, dates, and time intervals.  

5. Graph data: This includes data that is related to relationships between entities, such as social networks, supply chains, and organizational structures.  

6. Machine learning data: This includes data that is used for training and testing machine learning models, such as feature vectors, labels, and performance metrics.  

7. Streaming data: This includes data that is generated in real-time, such as sensor data, log files, and social media feeds.

What data can you transfer to Redshift?

You can transfer a wide variety of data to Redshift. This usually includes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data like transaction records, log files, JSON data, CSV files, and more, allowing robust, scalable data integration and analysis.

What are top ETL tools to transfer data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift?

The most prominent ETL tools to transfer data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to Redshift include:

  • Airbyte
  • Fivetran
  • Stitch
  • Matillion
  • Talend Data Integration

These tools help in extracting data from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) and various sources (APIs, databases, and more), transforming it efficiently, and loading it into Redshift and other databases, data warehouses and data lakes, enhancing data management capabilities.