The database migration “journey”
Suggest editsMigrating your database consists of a nine-step “journey.”
1. Decide to migrate
First, your organization must make the decision to migrate. You might decide you're spending too much money on your legacy database system. You might have initiatives that your current database technology doesn't support well. Or maybe you want to move to the cloud or take advantage of open-source software. These are common factors that might lead to your business case for migrating.
Once you have your business case and your organization buys into it, your organization must commit to performing the migration. Commitment includes funding and resources to perform the migration.
2. Analyze feasibility and alternatives
Analyze your alternatives and look at the feasibility of migrating to certain databases.
Review your application portfolio to determine whether all of your applications will migrate
As part of this review, you'll look at the applications that have legacy databases that you can and want to migrate from. Align your migration priorities with IT strategies to ensure these are important enough business applications to consider for migration.
As part of reviewing your application portfolio, you might decide that you can retire some applications. There might be other applications in your portfolio that you want to migrate but can't because they're supported only on the existing database.
As you're identifying a candidate set of applications to migrate, keep in mind that the desire to migrate them must correspond to an organizational commitment to completing the migration. It will take time, resources, and budget.
Evaluate which database technologies are the right choice as the migration target for each of your applications
In many cases, EDB Postgres Advanced Server is an ideal choice to replace Oracle. However, some applications have requirements that might be better addressed by other solutions.
After selecting the appropriate set of target database technologies, a follow-on step is to perform a more detailed assessment of how complex the migration will likely be. When EDB Postgres Advanced Server is a potential target, you can use the EDB Migration Portal to assess how compatible the Oracle schema and procedural objects in the database are with EDB Postgres Advanced Server. This information is important in the next step of the journey.
Prioritize applications
If you're considering migrating a large estate of applications, perform a first-level pass to identify the ones you want to move first. Are some so important that there would be more risk in moving them? You'll also want to look at the difficulty of the migrations and prioritize them based on that.
Decide on the hosting environment to target for your migration
See Infrastructure considerations for more information about the options you have for hosting the EDB Postgres Advanced Server database. Are you currently running on premises? Do you want to stay on premises or move to cloud? Or are you on the cloud and perhaps that hasn't worked out and you need to move back to on premises or to another cloud provider?
Identify potential migration problems
Although you'll perform a more thorough review of solutions to address specific compatibility issues that are encountered later in the journey, it's also important to identify potential migration problems in this early stage. For an Oracle-to-EDB Postgres Advanced Server migration, see Comparison of EDB Postgres Advanced Server with Oracle for details.
The main goals of this step are to:
- Understand which applications are good candidates for migration.
- Analyze the different technology and vendor options for the migrations.
- Understand the big picture of the overall level of effort, time, and cost to complete all the migrations.
Also consider the cost of continuing on current technology and platforms versus migrating to new technologies and platforms.
3. Plan the migration
Planning your migration involves these processes:
- Prioritizing the applications to migrate. Once you've decided on the applications to migrate, prioritize the order in which you'll migrate them. Organizations often consider selecting the most difficult ones because they believe that if they can do the most difficult migration, then all the other ones will be easier. However, we usually recommend picking one that is moderately important to you—not necessarily the most valuable to customers