Hosting database in cloud is a strong trend of DBMS world. There are important benefits of “Database as a Service” approach: reduced total cost of ownership (no need to host powerful database server or to have system administrator for DBMS maintenance), great flexibility and scalability of hardware and software system.
Nowadays many large software companies offer cloud-based database solutions, here are the most popular options:
- Amazon RDS – cloud services for IBM DB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases by Amazon
- Google Cloud SQL – web service to manage MySQL databases
- Heroku – platform as a service (PAAS) implementation of PostgreSQL
- IBM SmartCloud – IBM cloud service for DB2 databases
- SQL Azure – cloud service for SQL Server databases provided by Microsoft
Database migration from local DBMS to cloud platform consists of the following steps:
- Plan and setup. The main goal of this step is detailed research of capabilities of source and destination database management systems in order to find all features that are not supported in the destination cloud platform. It requires a lot of human resources to analyze and understandsemantic of database and related applications. The database specialist managing migrationprocess must understand the role of missing features in the destination DBMS and find design alternatives.
- Development. On this stepdatabase specialistsmust implement all tasks generated from the previous step of planning and design. Usually databases migration require application updates on the destination system. For example, Azure SQL needs clustered indexes for each database table that does not have it.
Even if no database objects wereupdated during the migration, applications may require modifications due to different security or error handling logic.
- Validation. This is the most important stage of the entire migration process. Database specialists should know that it is far less risky to validate regularly and fix errors being found fast than having code without validating for long periods.
The mostimportant areas deserving precise attention of both developers and database architects are:
- Security
- Error handling
- Logging
- Networking issues
During this step database activity should be isolated to avoid distortion results of benchmark.
Special Software
Intelligent Converters, a software company specializing in database migration and synchronization since 2001, provides software products and services to move data from popular DBMS such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS Access, DBase/FoxPro, SQLite, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2 to a cloud platform.
The appropriate converter migrates the data, constraints, indexes and queries (views) to the cloud storage with all necessary transformations. Also, the company offers free consulting of databaseexperts that can guide through all steps of migration process providing necessary information and advises.
The combination of high-qualitydatabase migration tools and cutting-edge skills in this field allows Intelligent Converters provide unique solutions to move databases to clouds.
