Migrating Oracle databases to the AWS Cloud - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Overview

Migrating Oracle databases to the AWS Cloud

Sagar Patel, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

July 2023 (document history)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying Oracle Database on the reliable and secure AWS Cloud infrastructure. This guide explains the options available for migrating your Oracle on-premises databases to the AWS Cloud. It also dives into the best practices and scenarios for exercising these migration options.

This guide is for program or project managers, product owners, database administrators, database engineers, and operations or infrastructure managers who are planning to migrate their on-premises Oracle databases to AWS.

Overview

Before you migrate your Oracle databases to AWS, you should understand and evaluate your migration strategy by using the framework discussed in Migration Strategy for Relational Databases.

The first step is to perform an analysis of your application and Oracle Database workloads to understand the complexity, compatibility, and cost of migration. Here are some of the top points you should consider when you plan to migrate:

  • Check the database current size and overall capacity growth. For example, if you're planning to migrate your Oracle database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon RDS Custom, you can create DB instances with up to 64 TiB of storage. For the latest information, see Amazon RDS DB instance storage in the Amazon RDS documentation.

  • Review Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports to check the resource usage and database health of your on-premises database.

  • Check current database dependencies on other databases. If your database is dependent on other databases, you can either migrate them together or create dependencies after you migrate your main database.

  • Check for application dependencies. If your database supports legacy, custom, or packaged applications, Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle might be a good choice. This service lets you retain control over database configurations, shared file systems, and operating system patches.

  • Determine the IOPS and throughput of your databases. If you're planning to migrate to Amazon RDS, consider the I/O performance of Amazon RDS DB instances.

  • Review your current architecture and auditing or compliance needs, to make sure you can satisfy these requirements after moving to either Amazon RDS or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

  • Check the version and edition of your Oracle Database software to make sure it's supported if you're planning to move to Amazon RDS for Oracle (see currently supported versions for Amazon RDS and Amazon RDS Custom).

  • Check the network connectivity between your on-premises environment and AWS, to make sure that it provides enough bandwidth for fast transfers of data between on premises and AWS.

  • Determine the amount of downtime you have available for migration so you can plan your migration approach and decide whether you want to use online or offline migration.

  • Identify your recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and service-level agreement (SLA) requirements for your existing database workloads.

  • Check the chipset endian platform of the database workload. AWS supports x86-x64 little-endian platforms. Other platforms, such as Sun SPARC, HP Tru64, or IBM zSeries-based big-endian platforms, require cross-platform migration.

  • AWS supports Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows operating systems. It doesn't support Solaris, HP-UX, or IBM AIX operating systems, which are commonly used for Oracle databases. Migrating Oracle databases from these operating systems requires platform conversion.