This post will take readers through the many intricacies of Oracle database and Snowflake, the process of migration from Oracle to Snowflake, and the optimized tools required for this activity.
Further, why would organizations want to migrate database Oracle to Snowflake?
Oracle database
Oracle is a Relational Database Management System (RDMS) and has various platforms including the Standard, Personal, Enterprise, and the Express Edition. Businesses can choose one of them in keeping with their specific needs.
There are several cutting-edge features of Oracle.
- Real Application and Clustering Feature helps users to scale in the usage of storage facilities as per requirements.
- In the case of an outage, data can be recovered quickly with the unaffected parts of the data in operation while the portion affected is recovered. Further data computing facilities remain active during any system or network failure and hence there is no downtime or stoppage of work.
- Oracle offers high data security and has mechanisms to track and monitor data access and usage. Being ACID-compliant, data reliability, and integrity on Oracle is assured.
Oracle is adaptable to various hardware and software configurations and most common applications can be integrated quickly and easily into the database.
Now, what are the features of Snowflake that make businesses migrate database Oracle to Snowflake?
Snowflake
For businesses wanting to incorporate advanced tools and technologies in their database management, a cloud-based data warehousing solution is now a preferred option.
- Snowflake provides excellent data management opportunities and users can work with both structured and unstructured data. This facility is not available on the Oracle database.
- Being cloud-based, Snowflake offers limitless computing and storage provision. Users have the flexibility to scale up or down in either of them as required and pay only for the quantum of resources used.
- The data warehouse is offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and organizations can quickly get new projects off the ground without additional investments in new hardware or software.
- Snowflake provides matchless computational power with multiple users being able to simultaneously execute multiple intricate queries without any lag in speed or drop in performance.
- Data security is strongly maintained on the Snowflake platform. Any data input requires federated and multi-factor authentication with end-to-end encryption guaranteeing data security and safety.
- A critical factor in Snowflake is its quick data recovery capabilities in case of a system failure or outage. When a disaster strikes one region, its Failover and Fallback feature automatically loop over to a secondary database in another region in the cloud without any stoppage of work. When the issue is resolved, the tool works in the reverse direction and the affected database is updated.
These advanced facets make this cloud-based platform a leader today in the field of database management.
Method for migrating database Oracle to Snowflake
The method for migrating databases from Oracle to Snowflake is not complex and can be effectively done with an optimized automated tool. There are four steps in this process.
- The first step is to mine data from the Oracle database and place it in a CSV file using the SQL Plus query tool in the database server along with the “Spool” command. This is a continuous process until the Spool command is switched off.
- The mined data has to be processed and formatted to match the data types that are supported by the Snowflake architecture. Currently, these are Big5, UTF-16, EUC-KR, UTF-8, and ISO-8859-1 to 9. If the extracted data type does not sync with them, a special format has to be created with the “File Format Option” and the date and time marked on the file.
- This formatted data cannot still be loaded into Snowflake but has to be kept in a temporary internal or external staging area. For an internal stage, a table has to be created and a name assigned to it. For the external stage, Snowflake currently supports Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.
- The final stage is copying the files from the staging area where the data is located to Snowflake. For small databases, the Data Loading Overview tool of Snowflake is used while the COPY INTO command is used to load large databases.
The process to migrate database Oracle to Snowflake is now complete.
Optimized tools for migrating database Oracle to Snowflake
While the migration process is not complex, using the best and optimized tools quickens it and makes the transfer more efficient. Here are some of the features of the top tools to look for.
- Ensure that the tool can handle large volumes of data for migration from Oracle to Snowflake. The database administrators should not have to intervene during migration.
- Select an automated tool that does away with the need for additional coding and setting up pipelines and connectors to transform data Oracle to Snowflake. A cutting-edge tool on the other hand will perform data replication, data transformation, data mergers, and data reconciliation without any human touch.
- Make sure that the tool and the data integration software uses Oracle CDC to capture the incremental changes instead of ETL. Such a tool does away with the necessity to go through time-consuming full refreshes every time changes to the data occur in the source database.
Select an Oracle to Snowflake tool with all these advanced features and the migration will be a smooth experience.
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