Organizations that have critical workloads running on an on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database often explore ways to migrate to the cloud while maintaining the same database engine (homogenous migration) with minimal to near-zero stoppage in work or downtime.

The good news is that there are solutions for migrating databases AWS DMS SQL Server to S3 using the SQL Server backup and restore method in conjunction with Amazon Web Service Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to reduce downtime. This method is very useful for migrating database code objects including views, storing procedures and functions as a part of database migration.

This solution of AWS DMS SQL Server to S3 applies to SQL Server database of any size. It keeps the database available for the application during migration. Further, the solution is also applicable when you have to perform validation on the target database during data replication from source to target, thereby saving time on data validation. However, this solution may be used only when there are no limitations on using SQL Server as a source for AWS DMS.

Why do organizations want to migrate databases from SQL Server to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)? It is because S3 provides unmatched data durability and scalability. Since it operates in the cloud, S3 offers unlimited storage capabilities and businesses can start new projects without investing in additional hardware and software. Other features of Amazon S3 include data protection, access management, data replication, and cost affordability. The database replication process of AWS DMS SQL Server to S3 can be carried out both within and outside the region with S3 having the capability to go through billions of objects of Batch Operations.

Fundamentals of using Amazon S3 as a target

Before migrating data through AWS DMS SQL Server to S3, you should keepthe following aspects in mind.

· The AWS account that is used for the migration should have an IAM role. Specific permissions should be given forspecific activities like write and delete access to target S3 bucket.

· Both the DMS replication instance for migrating the data and the S3 bucket being used as target has to be in the same AWS region.

· There should be tagging access in the role. It will ensure that objects that are written to the target bucket can be tagged via AWS CDC S3

· DMS (dms.amazonaws.com) is present in the IAM role as an additional entity.

Also, make sure that the role assigned to the user for completing the migration task has the required permissions to do so.

S3 is provided by Amazon and is useful for those who currently have limited needs for storage but which might increase to terabytes of data in the future.The data migrating feature AWS CDC S3is available in the 3.1.3 version of DMS. S3 is also used to support DMS while creating data lakes.