Migrating Database Oracle to Snowflake – Advantages and Method

Why would businesses want to migrate database Oracle to Snowflake? To get to the answer it is necessary to understand the cutting-edge advantages of Snowflake.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution providing the benefits of a cloud platform.

•Users can process and analyze data in its native format - unstructured, semi-structured, or structured. This capability is not available in Oracle and is the key motive for businesses to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

•Snowflake provides unlimited storage capabilities and organizations can seamlessly scale up usage whenever there is a spike in demand without installing additional hardware and software. There is no flat upfront fee and payment for storage facilities is only for the quantum of resources used.

•Snowflake offers high computing power. Even when multiple users are simultaneously executing multiple intricate queries, there is no lag or drop in performance.

•A critical benefit for which businesses want to migrate database Oracle to Snowflake is the Fail over Fallback feature of Snowflake. If there is an outage or disruption in the primary database, the secondary databases in the same or remote locations are automatically triggered and work is not obstructed. When the outage is resolved, Snowflake updates the primary database with the changes done in the broken period.

•Stringent data security measures are in place in Snowflake as all data is encrypted end-to-end with federated and multi-factor authentication.

All these features, typical of a cloud-based platform, give Snowflake an edge over the Oracle database.

Migrating Database Oracle to Snowflake

Migration of database Oracle to Snowflake is done in four steps.

•Extracting data from the Oracle database: The first step is to mine data from the Oracle database and transfer it to a CSV file with the help of the SQL Plus query tool built into the Oracle Database Server. The “Spool” command is used and the data is extracted continually until the command is switched off.

•Formatting the data extracted: The mined data has to be processed and formatted to match the type that is supported by the Snowflake architecture. Presently, Snowflake supports EUC-KR, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 to 9, Big5, and UTF-16 data types. If the extracted data does not match one of them, the “File Format Option” is to be used to create a customized format with the date and time mentioned on the file.

•Placing in a staging area: The formatted data cannot yet be placed directly in Snowflake. For migrating database Oracle to Snowflake, the formatted data has to be kept in a temporary cloud staging area. It might be an internal staging area where tables are to be created by the users with names and dates assigned to them or an external staging area like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.

•Migrating database to Snowflake: Finally, the data file is copied from the staging area to Snowflake.