Prioritization guide for refactoring Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases on AWS

Sagar Patel, Ryan Brenon, Mohan Karunanithi, and Isaac Enderline, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

December 2021 (document history)

The adoption of open-source databases, which provide lower costs, speed, and agility, is growing at a rapid pace. You might be planning to migrate your on-premises Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle commercial databases to open-source database engines such as PostgreSQL and MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the lack of tools, lack of resources, and time constraints might make it difficult to quickly identify databases that will require minimal effort to migrate.

This guide outlines a process that automates data collection and analysis, and prioritizes targets to better identify candidate databases. This process helps minimize the resources, cost, and effort that are involved in identifying the databases that can be migrated to an open-source database engine. The guide explains how to iterate through low-effort tasks to analyze database compatibility with an open-source engine, and helps you generate a prioritized list of databases that can be migrated with minimal effort.

The guide is for program or project managers, database administrators, database engineers, and operations or infrastructure managers who are planning to migrate their Oracle or SQL Server databases to open-source databases on AWS.

Selection and prioritization process

The database replatform prioritization process discussed in this guide includes three main steps: