Webinar "Oracle migration to Postgres in the Cloud"

Recently I attended a webinar “Oracle migration to Postgres in the Cloud”. It felt a bit like cheating, as I’m more an Oracle guy and my company is Oracle Platinum partner…. But very curious how easy it is to migrate (it depends…) and what hurdles to expect.

The webinar (1 hour) is on-line to watch, there’s only one little bump to overcome: you have to register…. On the bottom of this page where the webinar can be started (jump to the REPLY section) there are very interesting questions and answers, worth reading.

A management summary.

As you may know, the ‘Postgres Advanced Server’ of EnterpriseDB (EDB) , contains compatibility for Oracle. That means that the database is able (among other things) to run packages, procedures, functions, triggers and so on in their database. Almost needless to say they are not capable to implement the latest features of the Oracle database, but it looks like they are making a good effort. In version 11 DBMS_REDACT has been implemented for example.

So I was curious what they are offering for migration strategy and steps. As it appears, their cloud service is called EDB Postgres Cloud Database Service (https://cds.enterprisedb.com), runs on AWS, and there’s a free trial for 7 days.

Some highlights:

Different levels of migration in order of difficulty to migrate: only the schema and data, schema, data and code, and all the way: schema, data, code and interface.
OCI (Oracle Call Interface, not the Cloud abbreviation….) compatible drivers are very limited in functionality, so no sql*plus, sql*loader, or sql*forms against a postgres database
Roughly the migration steps:
- Extract the DDL creation commands from the Oracle database through a script, delivered by EDB.
- Run the output, a text-file, through a cloud-migration tool. When a statement can’t be rewritten by the migration script, manually interaction is needed.
- Create a Postgres database with the newly created text-file, and import the Oracle data

The effort needed to migrate depends of course of the complexity of your Oracle database/application.