Why Should You Use the ETL Tool for AWS Database Migration

AWS (Amazon Web Service) is a platform that is based in the cloud. Among the large range of services provided by AWS are high computing power, content delivery, and unlimited data storage capabilities. These are categorized into separate silos, enabling businesses to precisely estimate the costs of each service.

However, the most critical service provided by AWS is facilitating database migration between NoSQL databases, relational databases, or data warehouses. It can be either from one cloud provider to another or from on-premises servers to the cloud. The use of the AWS ETL tool is the most optimized process for carrying out this database migration.

ETL is an acronym for Extract, Transform, and Load. The tool is primarily used to combine multiple databases into a data warehouse or a centralized database for storage. There are three functions of AWS ETL. It first extracts data from the source database, transforms the data to the desired format, and finally loads the processed data into the intended target database. What makes database migration with ETL stand out is that the process is fully automated without any human intervention and thus not prone to errors or data loss, leading to high performance and cost savings.

Benefits of AWS ETL

Several benefits of AWS ETLmake it the preferred route of organizations for database migration.

· When migrating databases, organizations do not have to install and configure any additional drivers and applications. There is no need to make any changes to the source database when using the AWS ETLtool. Migration is started directly from the AWS Management Console and all changes at the source database are seamlessly replicated to the target database through Change Data Capture.

· Changes made at the source database are continually updated to the target database with the ETL but this is subject to the two databases always being in sync. The advantage here is that the source database is fully functional throughout the migration process without downtime, a very convenient factor for large data-driven businesses.

· Since the common and most-used databases are supported by AWS, it is possible to carry out migration with AWS ETLregardless of the structure of the databases. Two types of migration are done with the ETL tool. One is homogeneous migration when the data types, data codes, schema structures, and the database engines of the source and the target databases are the same. The other is heterogeneous migration when all these aspects differ from one another.

· Migration can be done 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.

It can be said that there are several advanced features of AWS ETL for database migration that are ideal for the cloud-based environment of today.