A Guide to Using the ETL Tool for AWS Database Migration

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a cloud-based platform that offers services like unlimited data storage capabilities, high computing power, and content delivery. These are categorized into separate silos making it easy for businesses to precisely estimate the costs of each service.

An important service provided by AWS is facilitating database migration from one cloud provider to another or from on-premises servers to the cloud as well as between NoSQL databases, relational databases, or data warehouses. To carry out this database migration, using the AWS ETL tool is by organizations.

Now, let’s see the functions of the ETL tool. ETL is short for Extract, Transform, and Load, and the tool is primarily used for combining multiple databases into a data warehouse or a centralized database for storage. AWS ETL has three basic functions. In the first, data is extracted from the source database. The second step is transforming the data to the desired format, and finally, loading the formatted data into a target database. This database migration with AWS ETL is fully automated and not prone to errors or data loss leading to high performance and cost savings.

Benefits of AWS ETL

Several benefits of AWS ETL make it the most preferred tool for organizations while undertaking database migration.

First, and this is critical, users do not have to install and configure any additional drivers and applications or need to make any modifications to the source database when using AWS ETL. This is because the migration process is initiated directly from the AWS Management Console and changes at the source database are replicated to the target database without human intervention through the Change Data Capture feature.

Modifications at the source database are continually replicated to the target database with AWS ETL provided the source and the target databases are always kept in sync. The benefit here is that the source database remains fully functional throughout the migration activity and downtime is not required. This is very convenient for large data-driven businesses as downtime for any length of time can be very inconvenient.

Migration can be taken up with AWS ETL regardless of the structure of databases as the most common and used ones are supported by AWS. The ETL tool is capable of two types of migration. One is homogeneous migration where the data codes, types, schema structures, and the database engines of the source and the target databases are the same. The other is heterogeneous migration when all these parameters are different for the source and the target databases.

Finally, migration with AWS ETL can be undertaken between on-premises databases to Amazon RDS or Amazon EC2, Aurora, and databases running on EC2 to RDS or vice versa. Data can also be migrated between SQL, text-based data, and NoSQL with DMS AWS.

These are some of the benefits of the AWS ETL tool.