In the modern business ecosystem, the database environment in any organization is the driving force behind its daily operations. However, there are several downsides to running a database in the conventional on-premises environment. These include high licensing and maintenance costs, lack of protection against rising security risks, and having to manually update to the latest versions.
On the other hand, cloud computing offers greater cost efficiency, data security, and scalability. Hence, it is not difficult for businesses to make a decision to migrate databases from on-premises Oracle to Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing solution.
This post will make a brief reference to Oracle and Snowflake individually, analyze why migrating to Snowflake makes sense, and finally how to carry out the migration process.
Let us start by briefly describing the origins and functions of Oracle and Snowflake.
Oracle Database Management System
Oracle, commercially launched in 1977 is a relational database management system (RDMS) that moves data into a database, stores it, and then retrieves it so that users can work with it in applications. RDMS distinguishes what content is required by an application and how things should be carried out. For example, in Oracle, after a user queries a table, the database finds the requested rows, reads the data in memory, and performs several steps before offering a result to the user.
Since its inception, Oracle has been among the first databases to provide support to LINUX/GNU. Oracle can be run on various hardware and software configurations and provides users with quick data retrieval and storage across different platforms. Most importantly, Oracle is ACID-compliant which means businesses are assured of excellent data integrity and dependability.
Before coming to the benefits of Oracle to Snowflake database migration, let us analyze the many aspects of Snowflake.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution with cutting-edge features that are typical of the cloud environment. It is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with a flexible and scalable architecture, two among several features that make migrating databases from on-premises Oracle to Snowflakevery attractive for businesses.
Check out the advanced capabilities of Snowflake here.
# Since Snowflake is based in the cloud, users get unlimited storage space by paying only for the quantum of resources used. Any sudden spike in demand for storage is quickly met by downloading the same from the cloud in minutes. Hence, businesses do not have to invest heavily in additional hardware to meet incremental storage demand. This is cost saving too when compared to Oracle where users must pay flat fees for certain storage space regardless of whether it is used or not.
# Snowflake offers users high computing power with no lag in the speed or performance of databases even when multiple queries are simultaneously executed by multiple users.
# Users can work with data in its native form. It is not necessary to format or process data from its structured, semi-structured, or structured form to work in Snowflake. This feature is not available for Oracle databases.
Snowflake is very user-friendly with most operations being fully automated, making it ideal for organizations to move databases from Oracle to Snowflake.
Benefits of Migrating from Oracle to Snowflake
Why do organizations migrate databases or switch platforms from Oracle to Snowflake? Let us go through the various benefits of this form of data movement.
# Snowflake has all the cutting-edge features of a cloud-based platform, having a data lake approach. Users are, therefore, not tied down to a specific location as on-premises servers and can function from any convenient place.
# The recently introduced Database Replication feature in Snowflake has taken its capabilities to the next level. It allows databases to be replicated and synced with various accounts that exist in different regions and cloud providers.
How does this work and help maintain business continuity in organizations? Let us take an example.
Think for a moment that there is an outage or crash and the primary server is non-functional. As soon as this happens, the secondary servers in other regions that are synced with the primary server are automatically started immediately and hence, there is no stoppage of work or downtime. Once the issue is resolved, the Database Replication feature works the other way. The secondary servers now update the primary server with all data and transactions that occurred in the break period.
# Being cloud-based, this data warehousing platform ensures secure and safe data portability across other regions or cloud providers. This is why Oracle to Snowflake database migration is so smooth and seamless.
How to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake
There are four steps to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.
# Use the SQL Plus Query tool in the Oracle source database to extract data from it. When used with the Spool command, it will continuously extract data till it is stopped. The data extracted is placed in a CSV file.
# The extracted data is now processed and formatted to match a structure that is supported by Snowflake. Presently, they are EUC-KR, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 to 9, Big5, and UTF-16.
# Place the processed data in a temporary internal or external staging location. While an internal staging area must be created by the users, external staging locations supported by Snowflake are Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) or Microsoft Azure.
# The final step in Oracle to Snowflake database migration is to move the data from the temporary location to Snowflake. The Data Loading Overview tool copies small databases to Snowflake. The COPY INTO command is used to copy large databases from the staging area to Snowflake.
The process of moving databases from Oracle to Snowflake is fully automated and does not need human intervention at any level.
