Introducing assessment tooling for Oracle database migration to Azure SQL and PostgreSQL- Preview
Published Oct 12 2022 10:44 AM 21.9K Views
Microsoft

The Database Migration Assessment for Oracle, an Azure Data Studio extension powered by Azure Database Migration Service, now offers a migration assessment for moving from Oracle Database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The assessment includes database migration recommendations and an evaluation of database code complexity. Through the same tooling, customers can get target sizing recommendations for Oracle Database migration to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is ideal for large workloads up to 100TB. Each of these are in preview, and build upon our previous announcements for the Database Migration Assessment for Oracle support for Azure SQL, and the Database Schema Conversion Toolkit that currently supports conversions from Oracle to Azure SQL. .

 

Database Migration Assessment for Oracle support for Azure Database for PostgreSQL

 

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a relational database  service based on the open-source Postgres database engine. As a fully managed database as a service offering, it can handle mission-critical workloads with predictable performance, security, high availability, and dynamic scalability. By 2022, according to Gartner’s State of the Opensource DBMS Market Research Report 2019, more than 70% of new in-house apps will be developed on an OSDBMS.1 We are supporting customers in this transition with these new tools.  

 

The decision to migrate on-prem Oracle databases is no trivial decision. It’s seldom driven by a single inflection point or goal, instead multiple factors act in unison to prompt a migration. When customers look to migrate their Oracle workloads to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, the common key drivers are:

  • Similarities between Oracle and PostgreSQL to ease effort of migration.
  • Increase productivity with a simplified end-to-end deployment experience at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating licensing costs
  • Enjoy a fully compatible, open-source PostgreSQL database with support for latest versions. Use your favourite PostgreSQL extensions and Microsoft’s open-source resources.
  • Protect your data with enterprise-grade security and compliance, with integrations to add the enhanced security capabilities of Azure Defender and double encryption.
  • Focus on application innovation with a fully managed, highly available (HA) PostgreSQL database, that provides maximum flexibility to elastically scale as your workload grows.

Support for Azure Database for PostgreSQL in the Database Migration Assessment for Oracle allows you to perform end to end assessments of Oracle workloads at no cost . This reduces the migration effort drastically, speeds up your migration to cloud, and minimizes the risk of failure for complex migrations.

 

This new tool will identify the potential migration destinations on Azure, recommend the best target, display the optimal right sizing of the selected target, and analyse the code complexity to convert to PostgreSQL target. This tool can be found as an extension in Azure Data Studio.

 

 

The extension performs two types of assessments:

 

  • Workload Assessment - Performs a lightweight discovery of the schema objects and categorizes the schema by their level of complexity to be migrated, which is used to provide an estimate for workhours needed for remediation. This is useful at the earliest stages of a migration to understand which workload or schemas are suitable for conversion, thus helping you to build an efficient migration plan.

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  • Code Assessment - The code assessment performs a deep assessment of the Oracle schema objects and then suggests an overall readiness of the code objects for migration. At a granular level, the object types are categorized as Ready, Needs review or Not ready. The tool then provides an estimate for the associated conversion hours with even higher accuracy. This functionality is provided by leveraging the Ora2pg tool.  

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Right sizing recommendations for Oracle database migrations to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL

 

Right Sizing of the target Azure target workload is always a challenging task. This extension analyses the performance system metadata from Oracle server and then suggests a suitable Azure PostgreSQL target by evaluating the performance metrics such as CPU, memory, IO etc.

The Automatic workload repository (AWR) maintains system tables that holds the snapshot of system metrics and its usage value. By default, the snapshots are generated on an hourly basis which includes CPU usage, time model statistics, resource wait statistics, memory usage, I/O throughput and top SQL queries information that is cumulative in nature up to the point in time of the snapshot. The AWR report provides the delta report that shows the metrics and its statistics between two snapshot intervals (begin and end snap ID\time).

 

AWR reports are commonly used for baselining and performance troubleshooting by DBAs and Developers. This capability will allow them to upload already existing AWR reports and generate a target recommendation.

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You can provide the AWR report at the time of the assessment and the advisor will parse the html file, analyze the actual usage of the hardware resources, and recommend the best Azure SQL or PostgreSQL target. This helps enterprises to minimize over-provisioning of the Azure target and optimizes operational run cost.

 

You can keep the assessments for historical and comparative analysis, export it to html files, and/or delete a specific assessment. 

Support for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

The Database Migration Assessment for Oracle extension within Azure Data Studio now also supports Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which is ideal for large workloads up to 100TB. 

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With these changes, migration planning is simplified for Oracle customers looking to modernize their data estate to Azure managed databases. Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL Database offer excellent value for Oracle customers looking to reduce administration overhead and optimize database license costs while maintaining performance. The new assessment scenarios help customers speed up migrations while reducing risk, making it easier than ever to move Oracle Database to Azure.

 

 

Next Steps

 

 We are always eager to hear from you, reach out to dmasupport@microsoft.com with your feedback and suggestions.

 

1: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3970418

 

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