So you have decided to move your Oracle database to the cloud. What next?

Choose your data replication tech wisely

Sponsored When it comes to shifting your existing on-prem database to the cloud, the big problem isn’t the destination. It’s the journey to getting there. There’s the spectre of downtime, of data being corrupted or lost, and for many companies, fear of the hurdles that incumbent database suppliers like Oracle might throw in their path to the cloud.

Migrating an Oracle database to the cloud can be a challenging project and one which requires meticulous planning to avoid disasters. There are quite a few database migration tools out there, including those from cloud vendors like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Big Red provides its their own migration tool set in the shape of GoldenGate, and has its own well-respected cloud offering. But it’s fair to say Oracle’s tooling falls into the “reassuringly expensive” category, and, like any other enterprise software vendor, it is not going to bend over backwards to help you take advantage of another vendor’s software or services, or downscale your use of its own.

So, before you begin any serious data migration, it’s best to ask yourself some questions before you start and consider what tooling will best help you get your data to the right database in the right cloud. Because Oracle will almost certainly raise some uncomfortable questions of its own.

There are myriad reasons to move to the cloud. You may feel you have outgrown your existing software and infrastructure and want more resource on tap. You may want to reduce expenditure on infrastructure and simplify the management of software. But you may also covet the ability to run your existing data on other platforms and try out new workflows, either with a different edition of your current Oracle database or with another target database entirely.

At the same time, you may not want to give up entirely on your on-prem Oracle operation or shift everything to a single cloud provider. A hybrid or multi-cloud setup may be far more appealing, giving increased flexibility, as well as a greater sense of control. You might even consider a private cloud approach. Either way, a one-off lift and shift to the public cloud is no longer your only option. Moving parts of your operation can give you the chance to experiment with the cloud, and with new ways of running your data ops.

As Quest’s senior market strategist John Pocknell explains, “One common use case might be to set up a reporting database in the cloud, which is a mirror of the main database. This will then relieve the load on the mission critical production database when users need to run reports at month-end.”

Going further, he says, if you’re running Oracle on-prem, you could choose to have your cloud database running on an alternative platform, like SQL Server, which could cut your organisation’s overall licensing costs, as well as allowing you to experiment with Microsoft’s BI and data warehousing tools.

Data integrity

Whatever configuration you decide on, two things will be likely be foremost in your mind: the amount of downtime your migration involves; and ensuring the integrity of your data, both during the migration, and on an ongoing basis. And wrapped around this, you’ll want the tools you use to underpin your migration to make your life easier, not more complex. And if you can achieve this while reducing cost? So much the better.

Given what an undertaking moving an organisation’s core database up to the cloud is, one might expect that professionals trade horror stories of famous disasters to illustrate what can go spectacularly wrong. But this doesn’t seem to be the case, says Pocknell, at least when it comes to unexpected downtime.

He cites the example of a customer in China who was planning a migration from on-prem Oracle to Amazon AWS EC2 and had actually planned (and budgeted for) 4 days of downtime, at a cost of $4,000 per hour, while they performed a manual migration. They used Quest’s SharePlex instead, which enabled them to perform the migration with no downtime or data loss, saving them $380,000. There was no loss of business.” For something like a financial trading floor, each second of downtime could represent a loss of thousands of dollars, he says: “Which is precisely why operations teams plan the heck out of doing a migration before they do it, which is probably why we can't find any cases where something's gone seriously wrong.”But all that work could mean nothing, if the data in the cloud is not up to date and error free. This is where the choice of data replication technology, during and after the migration, becomes crucial both in terms of speed and accuracy.

For example, there would be little benefit running a reporting database in the cloud if those reports that were not based on the same version of the data running on your core systems. “Somebody that's running a report doesn't want to be running that report against data that’s stale. Data could be changing at a rate of thousands of transactions per second, so that reporting database needs to be a replica of what's in the main database.”

An even bigger concern, says Pocknell, is the possibility of data corruption during the migration or in ongoing replication between source and target databases.

“So, you've diligently gone through your planning process, you've started migrating data, and then bringing people back online again, and for some reason, something got out of sync,” explains Pocknell. “And now all of a sudden, you've got either data missing or data corrupted, because it's not a true replica of what it was when it started out.” With Quest’s SharePlex, transaction integrity is continuously checked during the replication process and any errors logged if there are mismatches between the source and target databases. If errors are found, SharePlex’s Compare-and Repair utility checks the target database transactions match the source database, and repairs made to correct any discrepancies.

How much?

Although tools like Oracle’s GoldenGate offer similar functionality, this is not necessarily included as a standard component, meaning additional costs.

Added to this, the ease of configuration of your migration tooling and the extent of its reporting capabilities, can further bump up costs, says Pocknell, “because it's going to take your operations team longer to familiarise themselves with its configuration and operation, and make sure it's running properly and reliably during your migration.”

“With Oracle, you've got the GoldenGate piece, then, in order to match the capabilities of SharePlex, you've got to add the Oracle Management Pack in order to take advantage of SNMP monitoring,” he adds. “And then if you want to include data verification you’ve got to add Oracle Veridata, and all of this is priced by processor, so obviously the more processors you have, the more the cost escalates.”

SharePlex includes these features as standard, says Pocknell, meaning it will generally come in at around half the cost of the Oracle solution depending on the customer’s configuration.

A final factor when considering your choice of migration tool, is its flexibility. Oracle’s GoldenGate is geared towards migrations within the Oracle universe. Meanwhile, other cloud providers offer their own migration tools and services, but these tend to be focused on “lift-and-shift” operations designed to get your data into their own data offerings, ideally in their entirety and not as robust as a dedicated data replication solution. This type of migration also means you will have to take your database offline while doing the move, says Pocknell. “And then you've got a huge amount of latency involved in spinning it back up again and making available for users.”

“Oracle workloads are among the most intensive workloads of any database platform,” says Pocknell. “And so any non-Oracle cloud provider is very happy to help and provide support and licensing guidance and all manner of things to encourage Oracle customers to move to their cloud platform.”

Database targets

SharePlex also offers some non-Oracle database targets - recent additions include SQL Server and Kafka - giving greater freedom to explore new uses. The addition of Kafka support, for example, gives users the ability to continuously replicate Oracle data into the Kafka streaming platform quickly with a high degree of fault tolerance, so it can be used for data lake implementations, microservices and real-time analytics, says Pocknell.

SharePlex also supports Oracle database migration from Enterprise Edition to the lower-cost Standard Edition, so taken together with migrating Oracle database to a non-Oracle cloud provider, never mind another target database, may draw the attention, if not the wrath, of incumbent suppliers’ compliance teams who will likely want to audit your use of Oracle licenses, says Pocknell.

“Oracle doesn't want you to replicate your Oracle data to anything other than Oracle,” says Pocknell.

Nevertheless, he says, many customers remain determined to move to the cloud, including AWS and Azure and potentially other databases: “They know that the running costs are likely to be lower in the long term...There are lots of sort of other tangible cost savings, as well as the actual cost of the cloud platform itself.”

So, as you’re planning that cloud move for your Oracle databases, it may well seem like there are some formidable hurdles to clear. But if you take the time to choose both the right destination and the right tools to support your migration, it’s a journey worth making.

Sponsored by Quest