Comprehensive approach to Enterprise Database Migration

This blog post is a series of blogs on the database migration approach to be taken care of while you embark the database migration and modernization journey on Google cloud.

Very often we jump into complex database migration with tools which ultimately do not benefit the users and lead to catastrophic failure and many other consequences as well.

At Google cloud we follow a comprehensive approach or framework to de-risk the database migration journey. We start with below 3 approaches

1. Discovery — Database Migrations are complex, time consuming and challenging. During this Discovery phase intent is to get a clear understanding of customers' key business drivers and their motivation to embark on migration and modernization. Understanding customers's business use case and technical considerations mapping to the use cases. Educating the customers' on Google cloud database portfolio is the key here as well. Ideally a workshop which can span from a few hrs to half a day is recommended.
2. Scoping & Assessment — Once the discovery workshop is complete then we recommend scoping and assessment for the database footprint in customers' IT landscape. Intent of this exercise is to do analysis preferably with tools to understand the database landscape and migration complexity.

At Google we recommend Startozone to get infrastructure details supporting the database landscape i.e. vCPUs, RAM(memory), storage, OS etc. This is a great start for understanding the customer data estate and often known as "Data Estate Scoping". Scope it out to get a clear picture of the data estate and potential migration targets.

Few screenshots from Startozone tool for database insights f or MySQL database.

Screenshot clearly highlights the database footprint of MySQL — 3 databases and SQL Server — 1 database

Image below clearly highlights various infra details for MySQL databases i.e. cores, memory,storage, OS etc.

Post Scoping database migration assessment is the key which will help to de-risk the migration challenges and provide input to the Migration Planning stage. We recommend using migVisor (Google Cloud Partner Tooling). migVisor is a SaaS platform which basically helps to get started with assessing the database migration complexity to accelerate the DB migration with a cost effect ive approach. Tool in fact can give TCO for target databases on GCP post analyzing the complexity. Currently it supports GCP Cloud SQL and Spanner as target for managed database services.

Assuming your source is Oracle database running on Premise or any other Cloud VM you can get recommendation and analysis of complexity involving migration to Postgres DB engine or MySQL engine or SQL Server engine on Cloud SQL. migVisor provides cross-platform collection options, and a web-based console to explore and understand migration complexities. It does one time scan of your source database and highlights source databases configuration, schema, and proprietary database features, application code modernization and current data layer handling.These insights are super critical in analyzing migration complexity. For example Real Application Cluster fondly known as RAC in Oracle world will lead the complexity to high instead of medium or low for migration from Oracle to Postgres or mysql etc as RAC is proprietary to oracle database.

Few Screenshots below once you login into console.migvisor.com. Screenshot from Analyze module — analyzes source database i.e. Oracle with migration analysis for Postgres database engine on Cloud SQL. Red box in the screenshot highlights the use of proprietary feature of Oracle database i.e. Real application cluster with 2 instance ids and this needs to be re-architected on Postgres database engine in Cloud SQL

Screenshot from Compare module — Compare dashboard provides a pair-wise study of the complexity to migrate a certain source to a certain target. In my case Postgres 13(Cloud SQL) as a target on Google cloud.

You can keep selecting the required checkboxes i.e. various database engines. Again on the right hand in the image you can see thats has High Migration impact and Medium Migration impact.

Above Insights helps as great inputs to the DB Migration Plan which includes actual migration with tools.

3. Migration — Last but not the least is to incorporate these insights from your previous steps into your migration Plan. This step must have data validation and rollback strategy once migration is completed.

Stay tuned for more details on the migration plan with right tooling on my next blog.

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Comprehensive approach to Enterprise Database Migration was originally published in Google Cloud - Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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