Why should you migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake and how should you do it? Before going into more intricate details, let us understand the features of these two – Oracle and Snowflake – individually.
Oracle Database Management System (DBMS)
Oracle is a database management system primarily used for OTP (Online Transaction Processing). Its fully automated operating system can be run seamlessly on both the Oracle hardware as well as any other third-party operating servers. Oracle, launched commercially decades back in 1979, was among the first operating systems to support LINUX/GNU. It is also ACID-compliant, thereby ensuring a high level of data reliability, integrity, and security.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based and high-performing data warehousing solution. A SaaS product, it has all the cutting-edge features of the cloud environment such as scalable metrics and a flexible structure. These are the main reasons why organizations want to migrate their databases from Oracle to Snowflake.
Why Should You Migrate Databases From Oracle to Snowflake
Here are some of the reasons for moving databases from Oracle to Snowflake.
Users can work with data in its native form – unstructured, semi-structured, or structured – without needing to format or process it. This capability is not available on Snowflake.
Snowflake offers flexible storage options and users can use and pay for what is required only. Additional storage volume can be downloaded whenever needed by paying for it. On the other hand, Oracle charges flat rates for data storage, regardless of whether the full capacity is used or not. Hence, moving databases from Oracle to Snowflake is a cost-effective option.
Snowflake offers high computing power. Multiple users can carry out several intricate queries simultaneously without facing any lag or drop in performance.
Since Snowflake operates in a cloud-based environment, users can move databases securely and quickly from one cloud or region to another.
It is because of all these reasons that it makes sense to migrate databases from Oracle to Snowflake.
How Should You Migrate Databases From Oracle to Snowflake
The full migration process is done in four stages.
Data is first extracted from the Oracle database with the SQL Plus Query tool with the “Spool” command. The mined data is kept in a CSV file.
The extracted data is now processed and formatted to match one of the data structures that are accepted by Snowflake. Currently, Snowflake supports EUC-KR, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 to 9, Big5, and UTF-16.
The processed data is now kept in an internal or external staging area. An internal staging area can be created by users by allotting a name and date to it. External staging areas supported by Snowflake are Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) or Microsoft Azure.
The data is now loaded from the staging area to Snowflake.
This completes the process of migrating databases from Oracle to Snowflake.