Things to Keep in Mind While migrating Your Oracle Database to the Cloud

Numerous organizations are switching from on-prem to cloud databases. These cloud-native warehouses can offer more timely and reliable access, cost-efficiency, along with automated backup and recovery.  Still, most of the people are suspicious about whether the oracle database cloud is ideal for their company when they have been using an on-premises version of the oracle database for quite a while. Although there are numerous oracle database migration methods, the process can be simplified when working with an expert. Keep these key factors in mind before selecting a migration method to save your time and energy:

Have Knowledge about Your On-Premises OS/Platform and Version: - Be it Mac OS, Linux, or Windows, the platform you are working on, and the version you are using is critical. Make sure that you have a complete understanding of such things. Depending on the migration method you are interested in,  some operating requirements might be applicable.

Know Your On-Prem Database Version and Cloud Database Version: There are multiple migration options for one to choose from, depending upon the type of cloud base you are transferring to and your response. Workload migration from on-prem Database 11g to Oracle Database 12c, for instance, can be carried out using the data pump full transportable method. There are also numerous alternatives available such as data pump conventional import/export method. Although it’s an export/import mechanism, compatibility requirements differ.

Understand Your Database Character Set:  Your database character set represents the characters that are recognized by your computer. This can be of various types such as Unicode, UTF-8, and UTF-16, etc. If you are not sure about yours, contact the database administrator or run an SQL query. For utilizing remote cloning option, it must be confirmed that your on-prem database and the database cloud service database have compatible character sets and national character sets.

Little Endian vs. Big Endian: The terms little endian and big endian denote the order in which sequence of bytes are organized within the computer memory. Big-endian is the order in which the most crucial value in the sequence is stored first.  The reason why this matters is that certain migration methods have strict prerequisites on supporting conflicting formats.

 

 

The Acceptable Downtime: Your computer systems must be up and running at all times. However, move to the Oracle cloud would require some time shutting down your operations temporarily. Therefore consulting with your team leads is important before making a selection. A certain time of the day might be better for different departments. With this in mind, the time required for transition and the type of migration method considered best for your company can be better assessed.