Introducing the Amazon RDS Migration Tool

UPDATE 05/04: With the general availability of AWS Database Migration Service, we recommend that you use this tool instead of the RDS Migration Tool. Learn more about AWS Database Migration Service here.

You can use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases. The service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL.

Migrating databases can be a challenging task, often requiring application downtime while data is moved from the source database to the target database. To help you accomplish migrations effectively and with minimal downtime, we’re excited to tell you about the Amazon RDS Migration Tool. This powerful utility can be used to help you and/or your customers move data from on-premises and Amazon EC2-based databases to Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Aurora databases.

The RDS Migration Tool supports not only like-to-like migrations, e.g. Oracle-to-Oracle, but also migrations between different database platforms, e.g. SQL Server-to-Amazon Aurora. It runs as an EC2 instance and leverages the scaling power of AWS to match the needs of your migration task.

What Value Does the RDS Migration Tool Provide My Firm and End Customers?

If you’re an APN Partner helping customers migrate their workloads to AWS, the RDS Migration Tool can help you minimize the application downtime by capturing database changes on the source database while the source still receives transactions from the application. As the RDS Migration Tool can capture and replicate data heterogeneously, it can minimize application downtime even in complicated use cases, such as when migrating an Oracle database to Amazon Aurora

Specifically, the RDS Migration Tool provides the following features and benefits:

• Support for transactional change data capture (CDC) and application, with low performance impact on the source
• Support for heterogeneous migration (e.g. SQL Server-to-Aurora)
• Support for homogeneous migration (e.g. Oracle-to-Oracle)
• Data transfer optimizations for migrating entire database tables
• Light-weight column mapping & transformations
• Ability to select individual tables and columns and filter data rows for migration
• Reliable delivery and recovery
• Intuitive user experience that simplifies the steps required to migrate to AWS
• Monitoring and control functions with dashboard, metrics and alerts
• No need to deploy agents on the source to capture changes
• Scheduling of migration tasks

The use of the RDS Migration Tool software is free, however, the tool requires the use of Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS and other AWS services, and customers will be charged normal AWS fees for the migration instances they create.

How Do I Access the Tool?

Reach out to your PDM if you are interested in signing up to use the tool.