Migrate from Amazon RDS for Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL or Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using this self-service guide

Today, we’re introducing the Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (DMA) Connect program which is designed to help you migrate from Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition or Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Migration to Amazon RDS for Oracle is a common first step for many customers making their foray into Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed databases. To get further benefits of AWS, you may want to consider moving to fully-managed Amazon RDS database services like Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL which help merge the flexibility and low cost of open source databases with the robust, enterprise feature sets of commercial databases.

To help you, the Amazon DMA Connect team has created a self-service offering to help you through your migration journey. We have created a guided path that starts with helping you self-assess the complexity of migrating your workload. We have created a guided path that starts with helping you self-assess the complexity of migrating your workload. We offer a migration guide that helps build a migration plan, webinars tailored for specific workloads, and community forum tracked by migration experts to help answer your migration-related queries.

Why Amazon DMA Connect?

The Amazon DMA Connect program features a vibrant worldwide community of migration experts who facilitate peer-to-peer learning by authoring blogs and e-books, hosting webinars, and supporting community forums. They are passionate about sharing their AWS technical expertise and helping you in your migration journey to AWS database services. The program can help you gain advanced knowledge and sharpen your technical delivery best practices.

As we continue to expand the scope of our database migration accelerator programs, we’re pleased to announce that this new program adds five new ways for you to engage with AWS migration experts. These offerings help you receive support for assessing workload complexity, planning for your migration, and performing the migration steps.

1. Questionnaire – It all begins with an initial questionnaire to self-assess your workload. The questionnaire prompts you to think about not just the architecture, application, database, testing, deployment and operations, but also about your project and team setup.
2. Guide – The guide provides step-by-step guidance to migrate your database and refactor your applications. It’s designed to help you use tools such as the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT), and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). It provides a 12-step process and, a migration plan, and covers topics such as reports, ETL, testing, DevOps and cutover.
3. Webinar – Every week, a new webinar is posted to train on topics ranging from evaluating the right migration path for the application, to following a proven and repeatable database migration process, to architecture design and security. These pre-recorded sessions of 20-45-minute-length guide you with specific nuances for different use cases. You also have on-demand access to previously recorded webinars and can see the schedule of upcoming Webinar topics in the next section.
4. Community Forums – Migration experts use a new, community-driven, question-and-answer service to help you remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and enhance operation. AWS re:Post enables you to ask questions about anything related to designing, building, deploying, and operating workloads on AWS, and get answers from community experts, including AWS customers, partners, and employees. re:Post automatically connects your question with migration experts, and is also integrated with AWS Support. It’s part of the AWS Free Tier and is available to anyone with an AWS account. Our experts moderate, create tags for relevant questions, answer questions, and/or provide additional resources on a regular basis. Choose one (or more) of the following tags when posting your question:

• • DMA Connect
  • Oracle to MySQL
  • Oracle to Aurora
  • Oracle to PostgreSQL

The questions posted with these tags also appear under the topics, “DMA Connect”, “Migration and Transfer” and “Database”.

Webinar schedule

Check back and refresh the blog on or after the Webinar date to see the links to the newly published Webinar content.

Session 1, March 18, 2022 — Guide for Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL: Presented by Peter Larsen (Peter Larsen is a migration specialist on the Amazon DMA team with 40 years of software development and IT experience, who for the last 8 years has helped customers migrate enterprise applications to the cloud. He was part of the team that produced the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and today works with his team to discover the true nature of customer applications, architect their future state and plan every step of the way from code conversion to deployment.)

In this webinar he shows how a 12-step migration process can facilitate the migration of applications from AWS RDS for Oracle to RDS for PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL. This webinar breaks down an application into parts that can be automatically converted from Oracle specific PL/SQL code to PostgreSQL compatibility. This is the first in a series of webinars from the Database Migration Accelerator Connect (DMA Connect) team that helps customers plan and execute their migrations with minimal risk and effort.

Session 2, March 18, 2022 — Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL Setup & Cutover: Presented by Sean Del Prete (Sean has a strong background in database operations, holding many positions as a run-level DBA and engineer before becoming a Solutions Architect. He has migrated countless datastores from DC to DC, on premises to cloud, and cloud to cloud. Migrations have ranged from full schema conversions to new datastores and across relational, NoSQL, and big data technologies. He enjoys digging into each unique challenge and creating a solution for each customer and workload that best suits your SLA and use case requirements.)

In this webinar he explains the high level ins and outs of migrating from AWS RDS for Oracle to RDS for PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL. In this webinar he will explain the different types of migration options, how to leverage AWS DMS for bulk load and CDC replication, and how to properly validate you application data before and during a migration cutover. If you’ve been searching for a process on how you can migrate away from AWS RDS for Oracle to RDS for PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL, this is a great video to start your journey.

Session 3, March 25, 2022 — Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL DevOps: Presented by Sean Del Prete (Sean has a strong background in database operations, holding many positions as a run level DBA and engineer before becoming a Solutions Architect. During his time engineering automated solutions to scale a small team of DBA’s he started using configuration management and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions such as Puppet and Terraform. As a Solutions Architect, he understands the powerful nature of DevOps which has allowed him to help customers deploy modern, agile, scalable and cloud native solutions. He enjoys teaching customers and colleagues alike about the benefits and virtues of thinking of infrastructure management in a DevOps mindset.)

In this webinar he explains how DevOps can be leveraged for migrating from AWS RDS for Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL compatible editions and AWS RDS for PostgreSQL. In this webinar he will explain the different types of DevOps components, and how they interact with each other, with examples. Finally he will walk through a full migration using the DevOps components covered. If you’ve been curious about how DevOps can help you, and how it can be leveraged for your migration, this video is for you.

Session 4, April 1, 2022 — Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL Data Migration: Presented by Eli Doe (Eli Doe is a migration specialist Solutions Architect on the Amazon DMA team with a strong background in database migrations. He held many positions as a Systems Administrator, DBA, and DBE before becoming a Solutions Architect. He has carried out many large-scale database migrations and modernizations. As a Solutions Architect, he enjoys providing technical assistance to customers that are looking to migrate and modernize their existing databases.)

In this webinar he explains and demonstrates how AWS Schema Conversion Tool can be leveraged to modernize or refactor an Oracle schema, refactor embedded SQL in a Java application to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL compatible target. In addition, this webinar explains with demonstration how to logically migrate the data from Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible target using AWS Database Migration Service. If you are curious about modernizing your commercial databases to AWS purpose-built fully managed databases, this video is for you.

Session 5, April 15, 2022 — Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL Performance Tuning: Presented by Tom Brown (Tom Brown has been performing database and application modernizations and migrations for over 20 years across almost all commercial and open source DBMS and application stacks. Migration and modernization are not just about swapping infrastructure, but making sure future performance matches or exceeds current performance. As an AWS Solutions Architect, Tom has worked with Fortune 500 companies and startups to tune and teach better practices for maintaining today’s cloud architectures.)

In this webinar, he explains the process for evaluating performance on RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible Edition. He dives deep into the tools available to monitor and react to performance bottlenecks, and shows how to determine the correct approach to resolve those issues. If you are curious about taking your migrated workload to the next level of performance with AWS fully managed databases, this video is for you.

Session 6, April 29, 2022 — Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL Testing: Presented by Peter Larsen (Peter is a migration specialist on the Amazon DMA team with 40 years of software development and IT experience, who for the last 8 years has helped customers migrate enterprise applications to the cloud. He was part of the team that produced the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and today works with his team to discover the true nature of customer applications, architect their future state and plan every step of the way from code conversion to deployment.)

In this webinar, he shows how application migrations from Amazon RDS for Oracle to RDS for PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible edition should be tested. This webinar breaks down application testing into different responsibilities, tools and techniques. This is a talk in a series of webinars from the Database Migration Accelerator Connect (DMA Connect) team that helps customers plan and execute their migrations with minimal risk and effort.

Session 7, May 13, 2022 – Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL – Business Intelligence Workloads: Presented by Sivaraman Radharaman  (Siva is a Solutions Architect on the AWS DMA team with 10 years of migration experience. He has worked on several on-premise commercial engines and understands the capacity/limitation on each of them. He enjoys providing migration solutions on data warehouses, data lakes and Datamart by continuously staying on top of technology to deliver quality results for the customer.)

In this webinar he explains migrating ETL scripts using Schema Conversion Tool to Amazon Redshift using AWS Glue and recommends best practices associated with ETL migration. He also analyses different factors and components that contribute towards making a choice between Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL versus Amazon Redshift for reporting and query processing. This webinar is for those who have decided to migrate or are in the process of migration, and require their ETL code and reporting datasets to be migrated into a modern data architecture.

Session 8, May 27, 2022 – Oracle Migration to PostgreSQL Deployment: Presented by Peter Larsen (Peter is a migration specialist on the Amazon DMA team with 40 years of software development and IT experience, who for the last 8 years has helped customers migrate enterprise applications to the cloud. He was part of the team that produced the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and today works with his team to discover the true nature of customer applications, architect their future state and plan every step of the way from code conversion to deployment.)

In this webinar he shows how application migrations from Amazon RDS for Oracle to RDS for PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible edition should be deployed. This webinar breaks down considerations for application migration cutover into different responsibilities, methods and considerations.

Conclusion

Customers of every size and industry are moving to the cloud to increase their security, agility, cost-efficiency, scalability, and ease of deployment. Many of you are asking for guidance to help your AWS environments meet those requirements and recognize the importance of self-serve migration for a bigger impact on your overall migration strategy. If you’re ready to get started and receive prescriptive guidance for migrating to Aurora PostgreSQL or Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, we can help.

In this post, we introduced Amazon DMA Connect, a program through which you take advantage of subject matter experts, gain insights, simplify your migrations, and migrate your workloads yourself!

We value your feedback and questions— please reach out to our team to get started with the program or give feedback about this post by emailing dma-connect-core@amazon.com.

Start your migration journey by assessing the complexity of your migration.

About the Author

Meenal Gupta is a Sr. Program Manager at AWS based in Seattle, U.S. She works closely with customers and partners within the area of AWS Databases & Analytics services, management, governance, migration and modernization. She has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry in various areas such as Product Development, Consulting, Operations, UX, Marketing, Speech and Natural Language, SaaS, and Database and Analytics Migrations.