News

New Functionality for AWS Database Migration Service

• By David Ramel
• 07/15/2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) added new functionality to its Database Migration Service (DMS) that helps enterprises move their databases to the cloud without downtime.

The DMS was launched in March. "The AWS Database Migration Service works by setting up and then managing a replication instance on AWS," said spokesperson Jeff Barr at the time. "This instance unloads data from the source database and loads it into the destination database, and can be used for a one-time migration followed by on-going replication to support a migration that entails minimal downtime.

"Along the way DMS handles many of the complex details associated with migration, including data type transformation and conversion from one database platform to another (Oracle to Aurora, for example). The service also monitors the replication and the health of the instance, notifies you if something goes wrong, and automatically provisions a replacement instance if necessary."

The service now supports continuous data replication, SSL endpoints and the SAP ASE database, formerly called SAP Sybase ASE.

Commenting on the continuous data replication support, AWS said in a blog post that "Customers have the option of enabling Multi-AZ which provides a replication stream that is fault tolerant through redundant replication servers. Continuous replication, when combined with DMS' ability to migrate data between database engines, results in an exponential growth of potential use cases."

The SSL-enabled endpoints include SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, and MariaDB.

Also, the company said, "DMS now supports SAP ASE ... as a source and target for database migrations. Customers now have the option to move data to and from an ASE database running either on-premises or in EC2. Data can also be moved between ASE and any of the other database engines supported by DMS, including Amazon Redshift."

AWS said customers pay only for the compute resources used during a DMS migration, meaning that moving a terabyte-size database could cost as little as $3.