Why to migrate from Oracle to Amazon Aurora

Traditional relational databases are the workhorses of application architectures. They can be used for a variety of application patterns and have broad support across programming languages. Most developers have existing experience with relational data modeling. Therefore, a relational database is a common choice for the data layers of applications.

But many relational database engines were built for the pre-cloud era. The flexibility of the cloud has changed how you can host, manage, and scale databases. On the contrary, Aurora was built to take full advantage of the cloud. Aurora is able to provide five times the performance of MySQL and three times the performance of PostgreSQL, with full compatibility with existing libraries. If you're using a commercial database such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database, Aurora can provide the same performance at one-tenth the cost.

In addition to performance gains, Aurora can provide better scalability, availability, and durability than traditional databases by taking advantage of the scale of the AWS Cloud. You can add up to fifteen low-latency read replicas to scale up your read capacity. Aurora also replicates your data to six copies across three Availability Zones to ensure the safety of your data. These copies are continuously replicated to Amazon S3 for ultimate durability.

More and more, applications are expanding internationally. The internet has enabled businesses to serve customers from all around the world. But handling this global demand with a traditional database is difficult. Your global customers make requests across the world to fetch data, resulting in slow application performance and dissatisfied users. With Amazon Aurora Global Database, you can seamlessly replicate your data to multiple AWS Regions. Data is copied around the world with subsecond latency, giving you fast, up-to-date data in every AWS Region where you serve your customers.

Finally, Aurora is innovative on pricing. Legacy commercial databases lock you in with long-term annual licensing contracts. Aurora does not have annual contracts and allows you to pay on a per-hour basis for the instances you have provisioned. Additionally, Amazon Aurora Serverless provides an Auto Scaling, pay-per-use model for your relational database. With Aurora Serverless, you pay only for the resources you consume on a per-second basis. Stop paying for idle and start paying for usage.

Database administration is an important task. You need to ensure you have a readily available instance to promote in the event of instance failure. You need to design and configure a backup and recovery plan.

With a cloud-native database such as Aurora, you can reduce the undifferentiated heavy lifting of database operations and focus on the aspects where you can differentiate your company. As a database administrator, this means using your expertise to help with schema design and query optimization. As an application developer, this means focusing on your application rather than your infrastructure. As a company, it means innovating on your product rather than diverting resources to keep your systems running. With Aurora, you can focus on the things that matter and drive value.

Migrating a database from one platform to another is a delicate process. If you are moving an existing database to Aurora, AWS provides a number of services to make your migration easier.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service you can use to migrate your database from an existing database to a fully managed database on AWS. AWS DMS handles copying existing data into a new database managed by AWS. Additionally, you can use AWS DMS to replicate data on an ongoing basis, giving you better control on the timing to switch your application to your new database.

AWS DMS supports migration from eleven different database source endpoints to fifteen different database target endpoints. You can even move from one database engine to another, allowing you to move from a licensed commercial database to a cloud-native database such as Aurora. If you do a heterogeneous migration from one database engine to another, you can use AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) to handle the differences in schemas between the two database engines. While AWS DMS handles data migration, AWS SCT converts database schemas, stored procedures, and views from one database to another. AWS SCT can greatly simplify the migration as you upgrade to a new database engine.

If you need hands-on assistance with your migration, AWS has a number of options for you. AWS Professional Services has experienced professionals who can work with you to manage your data migration. The AWS Professional Services team has worked with thousands of customers of all sizes to safely plan and execute data migrations to cloud-native databases.

AWS also has an extensive listing of partners through the AWS Partner Network (APN). There are tens of thousands of partners in the APN, each with a unique focus and capability. These partners have been vetted to ensure proper AWS expertise. Whether you need consulting advice or hands-on technical implementation, you can find an APN Partner that fits your needs.

Finally, if you need help with your database migration, AWS has options available for you. Both the Database Freedom program and Amazon Database Migration Accelerator solution provide expert advice and migration assistance to qualified customers. Use the knowledge of database migration experts to help you migrate seamlessly.