New data migration capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL

Posted on: Sep 5, 2013

We are pleased to announce the availability of new data migration capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL. These new capabilities allow you to perform near zero downtime data migration from your external MySQL database instances (running on-premise or on Amazon EC2) to your Amazon RDS MySQL database instances and vice versa.

Until now, in order to import data from your external MySQL instance to your Amazon RDS instance you had to start by setting up a baseline (using the mysqldump or mysqlimport utilities). Then, you had to manually replay the transactions that had occurred on your external MySQL instance since the initial baseline was created. This process was difficult and error-prone. Now, with this new feature, once your initial baseline is set, you can simply configure your Amazon RDS instance as a replication target for your external MySQL instance and capture all the transactions that have occurred since the time you setup the initial baseline. For more information about this feature, please refer to the data import section of the Amazon RDS User Guide. Also, please note that this feature is only supported for MySQL database instances running MySQL 5.5.33, or 5.6.13 and above.

Furthermore, with MySQL 5.6.13 you can utilize your Amazon RDS MySQL binlogs to export your data as and when required. Please refer to the data export section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more.

We hope that these new capabilities will give you an easy way to migrate your MySQL database workloads to Amazon RDS for MySQL.