Migrating Oracle Databases to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

A significant number of organizations are migrating off legacy commercial databases (e.g., Oracle, Microsoft SQL, etc.) and on to open source databases. Many are taking advantage of this change to virtualize their database infrastructure, either with an on-premises solution or with one of the numerous cloud providers.  

In this blog post, we’ll provide insight into how you can migrate your Oracle database to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. For many organizations, this migration offers significant cost savings on annual license maintenance and ongoing on-premises infrastructure maintenance.  Instead, costs are moved to Amazon’s RDS, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform.

What is Amazon RDS? 

Amazon RDS is a turnkey DBaaS solution that allows organizations to host MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL. Because RDS offloads much of the tedious database management functions, organization focus on their business instead of maintaining databases. Some key features of Amazon RDS include:

• Ability to scale CPU, Memory, Storage and IOPS
• Automatic and on-demand backups
• Software patching, automatic failover detection, and recovery
• High availability, giving the ability to replicate to and fail over to a secondary database
• Ability to add read-only database replicas to increase application scalability

The challenge, of course, is how to migrate your database from Oracle to PostgreSQL.  Luckily, Amazon has solved this with the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). With Amazon DMS, one can perform both homogenous and heterogenous data migrations, from on-premises or Amazon RDS, with Amazon RDS as a target.

How to Migrate Your Oracle Database to Amazon RDS

There are three steps to follow to migrate from an on-premises Oracle database to PostgreSQL on RDS:

1. Convert the schema structure, data types and database code from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

2. Migrate data from source database to target database.

3. Optionally, continue to replicate data so that you can keep data in sync as you validate your solution.

How to Monitor your Amazon RDS Database

Now that you’ve migrated your database to Amazon RDS, how can you monitor it? And, how can you tell if the performance you’re seeing on your new cloud-hosted database compares to your on-premises solution? 

Leveraging your legacy monitoring tool for your new Amazon RDS database can be challenging; either the results are underwhelming or it plain doesn’t work. Many database monitoring solutions for traditional databases offer deep functionality for monitoring those types of databases — but haven’t yet crossed over to a solution that crosses the different databases in the market today.

In turn, you can look at a cloud-based database performance monitoring tool like SelectStar, which offers heterogeneous database support across on-premises and cloud-hosted databases, as well as insight into the underlying cloud host or hypervisor.  With a single tool, you can monitor your on-premises Oracle databases as well as your new PostgreSQL database in the cloud.  

In my next blog, I’ll dive deep into the data — highlighting key performance indicators and system recommendations — you can uncover for your Oracle on-premises database and our new PostgreSQL database hosted on Amazon RDS to optimize your database monitoring and in turn, your overall performance.

Interested in learning how you can simplify your database management, no matter how many different types your organization? Check out this on-demand webinar with four key recommendations. 

This blog post first appeared on SelectStar. Read the full post here.