Should You Migrate Oracle Database to Snowflake

Should you migrate a database from Oracle to Snowflake? The answer is a YES. This post will take you through the benefits of this migration and how to do it.

Oracle is a database management system used primarily for processing databases through online transactions. It is a fully-automated operating system and can run on third-party servers apart from the Oracle hardware. On the other hand, Snowflake is a highly optimized data warehousing solution offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product. As will be seen now, Snowflake provides several cutting-edge benefits for which organizations around the world are opting to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

Here are some of the reasons why it is preferable to migrate Oracle database to Snowflake.

· The most critical benefit of being on Snowflake is that users can work with data in its native format regardless of whether it is unstructured, semi-structured, or structured without having to process it first. Oracle database does not have this capability.

· Being a cloud-based platform, Snowflake offers unlimited storage facilities and users can scale up or down in storage usage as per requirement by paying only for the volume of resources used. In the Oracle database, users have to pay flat fees for data storage even if it is not used. Migrating database from Oracle to Snowflake is therefore a very cost-effective proposition.

· As in storage, Snowflake offers unlimited computing powers too. There is no drop in speeds or performance even when multiple users simultaneously carry out multiple intricate queries. It is not the same in Oracle database.

· Snowflake has recently introduced the Database Replication feature where databases that exist in various regions and other cloud providers can be replicated. This leads to business continuity as in the event of a crash in the primary server, secondary servers where the databases have been replicated are automatically triggered and work can go on without any downtime. After the issue is resolved, the primary server is updated with the data that occurred in the break period. This is a very critical reason for businesses to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

· Snowflake brings all the benefits of the cloud to the table including improvement of database speed and performance, ensuring stringent data security, unlimited storage, and seamless data portability.

It is for all these benefits that more and more businesses are migrating their databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

Migrating databases to Snowflake from Oracle is done in four steps.

In the first, data is extracted from the Oracle database with the SQL Plus Query tool and the Spool command. Next, this data is processed and formatted to match the data structures that are supported by Snowflake after which it is temporarily located in an internal or external cloud staging area. The final step is migrating data in the staging location to Snowflake.