Isetan Mitsukoshi System Solutions seamlessly migrates databases to Amazon Aurora using Amazon DMA

Isetan Mitsukoshi System Solutions (IMS) develops IT strategies, provides solutions, and runs systems for the group’s 44 department stores and companies and 17,000 employees. IMS enables the group’s core department store business to receive mission-critical IT solutions like sales management, revenue control, and analytics, as well as digital transformation (DX) initiatives. “Our great variety of IT solutions ranges from operating business systems to using cutting-edge technology,” says Takeshi Karasawa, General Manager of ICT Engineer Services at IMS. “With DX as one of our main focuses, we use digital technology to provide new value to customers, improve employee productivity, and preserve the heritage of our department stores. We’re also committed to modernization to support smart devices, lowering operating workloads and expenses, and creating DX-friendly environments.”

According to Karasawa, high-load legacy systems impeded the progression of DX. Historically, IMS operated on-premises commercial databases, but over time, the increasing costs to operate these databases became a major issue. Database licensing costs alone were a significant portion of the group’s total IT expenses, requiring significant annual renewal costs and operational workloads. The company therefore turned to AWS to help with their DX, shifting its databases to the cloud and alleviating the expense and time-consuming effort of self-managing databases.

As a customer of AWS, IMS was already accustomed to AWS cloud services. In phase one, the goal was to quickly reduces the administrative burden of self-managing its on-premises system by re-platforming the databases to the cloud. The company migrated its commercial databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle, a fully managed commercial database that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Oracle deployments in the cloud.

However, the end goal for IMS was to modernize to the cloud-native database, Amazon Aurora, which is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. “Amazon Aurora’s affordable high-performance databases reduce expensive licensing costs,” says Karasawa. In addition, IMS chose Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition for its performance capabilities to support a high concurrency environment, its lower conversion cost from Oracle PL/SQL stored procedure, and its ease of use.

In phase two of its DX and modernization journey, IMS procured the help of Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (Amazon DMA) to help accelerate its database migrations to AWS. Due to limited engineering resources and the added complexity needed to convert schemas and source code objects to be compatible with the target engine, DMA provided the technical expertise needed to quickly convert schemas and applications. Amazon DMA also provided a detailed playbook for IMS to migrate the databases to production.

IMS then used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a managed migration and replication service to help move workloads to AWS quickly with minimal downtime and zero data loss, to migrate from Amazon RDS for Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.