Why Should You Migrate Database from Oracle to Snowflake and How

Oracle RDMS (Relational Database Management System) has a lot going for it. It can run on a wide range of hardware and software operating systems and also ensure fast storage and retrieval of data. One of the first databases to provide support to GNU/LINUX, Oracle guarantees data reliability and integrity since it is ACID-compliant. Given these positives, why do organizations today prefer to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake?

To understand this point, let’s check the many cutting-edge benefits that Snowflake brings to the table.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that provides all the benefits of the cloud environment, making operating on it a cost-effective and efficient activity.

Here are some of the benefits of Snowflake.

• Users can work with data in its native format – structured, semi-structured, or unstructured – which leads to better database management, a facility that is not present in Oracle.

• Snowflake is a fully-managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and organizations do not have to invest in hardware and software installation to get their systems up and running.

• Being a cloud-based platform, Snowflake offers unlimited storage capabilities and users can scale up or down in resource utilization by paying only for what is used. This leads to cost savings as unlike Oracle, flat fees are not charged regardless of storage used.

• Snowflake offers high computing powers and there is no drop in performance even when multiple users simultaneously execute intricate queries. This is a very compelling reason in the modern data-dependent business environment and is one of the key reasons for migrating databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

• A critical benefit of Snowflake is data recovery after an outage. In case there is a disruption in the primary database, secondary databases in on-site or remote locations are automatically triggered and there is no break in work. After the issue is resolved, all changes that occurred in this period are updated in the primary database. This eliminates the possibility of data loss.

These are some of the reasons why migrating databases from Oracle to Snowflake is a preferred choice of businesses today.

How to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.

There are four steps in this process.

• The first step is to extract data from the Oracle database with the SQ Plus query tool and by executing the “Spool” command. This data is then placed in a CXSV file.

• This extracted data has to be now formatted and processed so that it matches the data structures that are supported by Snowflake. Currently, these are ISO-8859-1 to 9, Big5, EUC-KR, UTF-8, and UTF-16.

• The formatted data is temporarily kept in an internal or external staging area as it cannot be directly loaded into Snowflake.

• The final step is transferring the data from a staging area to Snowflake.

This process is easy as it is completely automated.