Q. What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools.
Q. Why should I migrate data to Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift delivers fast query performance by using columnar storage technology to improve I/O efficiency and parallelizing queries across multiple nodes. You can have unlimited number of users doing unlimited analytics on all your data. You can easily resize your cluster up and down, as your performance and capacity needs change, with just a few clicks in the console or a simple API call. Amazon Redshift allows you to easily automate most of the common administrative tasks to manage, monitor, and scale your data warehouse, so that you can focus on analyzing your data and gaining insights required to run your business efficiently.
Q: What is Amazon Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS) and what are the benefits of using it for migration?
Amazon Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS) is a low-cost service to help you migrate databases and data warehouses to Amazon Web Services easily and securely. Replication tasks can be set up in minutes instead of hours or days, compared to self-managed replication solutions that have to be installed and configured. Amazon DMS data replication integrates tightly with the Amazon Schema Conversion Tool, simplifying heterogeneous database migration projects such as Oracle to Amazon Redshift.
Q: What is the Amazon Schema Conversion Tool (Amazon SCT)?
The Amazon Schema Conversion Tool (Amazon SCT) makes heterogeneous database and data warehouse migrations easy by automatically converting the source schema from Oracle and a majority of the custom code, including views, stored procedures, and functions to a format compatible with the target database such as Amazon Redshift. Any code that cannot be automatically converted is clearly marked so that you can manually convert it.
Q: What is a CloudFormation stack?
A CloudFormation stack is a collection of Amazon Web Services resources that you can manage as a single unit. The resources in a stack are defined by the stack's CloudFormation template. In this project, you will use a CloudFormation stack to create and provision the VPC, subnets, security groups, and Amazon RDS instances you need to complete the data warehouse migration from Oracle to Amazon Redshift. After completing the project, you can easily delete the stack to avoid incurring additional charges.
Q: Can I customize the CloudFormation template used in this project?
Yes. The CloudFormation template is designed to obtain a few inputs from the user and provision the required Amazon Web Services services with minimum configurations. However, if you would like to change some of the configurations such as VPC CIDR block, Amazon RDS instance types, etc., you can update the template and re-launch it.
Q. Does Amazon DMS and SCT support migration of complex database schemas?
Yes. This project helps in understanding the methodology to be used for heterogeneous database migrations using a simple schema structure. This experience can help you to migrate more complex data warehouses.
Q. Does Amazon DMS service support only full-data migration, as illustrated in this project?
No. You can use Amazon DMS for one-time full-data migration, as well as continuous data replication (CDC). Amazon DMS captures changes on the source database and applies them in a transactionally consistent way to the target. The only change you need to do is in the Task settings. Create a new task with CDC enabled, and then the data replication task will run until you change or terminate it.