Migrate the data - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
AWS DMSOffline migration options

Migrate the data

When the schema migration is complete, you can move your data from the source database to the target database. Depending on your application availability requirements, you can run a simple extraction job that performs a one-time copy of the source data into the new database. Or, you can use a tool that copies the current data and continues to replicate all changes until you are ready to cut over to the new database. For rehost and replatform migrations, we recommend that you use native database-specific tools to migrate your data.

Tools that can help you with the data transfer include AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and offline migration tools. These are described in the following sections.

AWS DMS

After you use AWS SCT to convert your schema objects from the source database engine to the target engine, you can use AWS DMS to migrate the data. With AWS DMS you can keep the source database up and running while the data is being replicated. You can perform a one-time copy of your data or copy with continuous replication. When the source and target databases are in sync, you can take your database offline and move your operations to the target database. AWS DMS can be used for homogeneous database migrations (for example, from an on-premises Oracle database to an Amazon RDS for Oracle database) as well as heterogeneous migrations (for example, from an on-premises Oracle database to an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database). For more information about working with AWS DMS, see the AWS DMS documentation.

Offline migration options

You can use other options in addition to AWS DMS to extract your data from the source database and load it to the target database. These options are mostly suitable when application downtime is allowed during the data migration activity. Examples of these methods include:

  • A comma-separate values (CSV) extract from the source database loaded to the target database

  • For Oracle source databases, the ora2pg utility to copy the data to PostgreSQL

  • Custom extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs to copy the data from source to target