Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration Best Practices

An Oracle to Amazon RDS migration is an extensive process that requires significant resources. Thoroughly planning each step ahead of time and gathering the right information to answer critical migration questions sets your organization up for success.

Evaluate Your On-Premises Oracle Database Performance

Many organizations opt to migrate databases to the cloud to improve overall performance, but you need a way to evaluate how much of a boost it brings. You need to gather a variety of data on your current Oracle performance under different conditions to make a fair comparison to Amazon RDS. Keep an eye on your high and low usage numbers, performance bottlenecks, storage requirements, and other metrics.

This information is also important for choosing the right scale of services for your Oracle databases. You don’t want to be significantly under- or over-provisioned following your migration. While scaling your resources is not difficult in the cloud, it adds extra work on top of an already complex process.

Visit Your Disaster Recovery Strategy

Disaster recovery processes for on-premises Oracle databases may use drastically different solutions than the cloud. Explore the potential changes that may need to occur in your disaster recovery technology, procedures, and policies to account for the post-migration environment.

Study Your Workload Security Requirements

How are you currently protecting your Oracle databases on-premises? How much of your data is categorized as sensitive information or otherwise subject to data regulations? What are the biggest threats facing your database workloads currently?

Answering these questions gives you greater clarity into the security measures that would benefit your databases the most in Amazon RDS. AWS offers a robust set of security features that often exceed what organizations have available on-premises, especially for smaller businesses.

Identify Current Database Points of Failure

What scenarios could result in database downtime or loss with your on-premises Oracle databases? You may be able to completely eliminate these points of failure following an Amazon RDS migration. For example, if you have all of your servers in the same data center, a local outage could cause unplanned downtime for all your systems. A cloud-based infrastructure gives you greater flexibility for distributing your databases in different locations.

Understand the Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration Risks Ahead of Time

Data migrations may fail, especially for organizations that lack technical specialists with experience in this area. Cover potential failure scenarios to see whether you can plan around these issues, or minimize the impact so the project can continue.

Get more details about the Oracle to Amazon RDS migration process. Download our white paper “Why You Should Consider an Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration.”