Cloud computing is a concept that embraces the idea of remote work. It essentially allows users to access computing services online as a service. The specifications of the remote setup may be very different from those of the computer used to access it. It allows professionals to go beyond hardware limitations in development and truly focus on their product. Similar to product development, databases can also be hosted and managed in the cloud.
Slowly, cloud databases are becoming a standard in the IT industry. This is due to their ability to scale and move. Additionally, cloud platforms are extremely secure, usually maintaining multiple copies of data for easy recovery.
The most popular cloud database solutions these days are:
- Amazon RDS: Offered by Amazon as part of Amazon Web Services, it can host a variety of databases
- SQL Azure: Offered by Microsoft for MS SQL databases
- Google Cloud: Offered by Google for use with MySQL databases
- Oracle Cloud: Offered by Oracle for Oracle database
If you are planning to migrate database from a local setup to the cloud, you may follow the below steps:
- Plan your migration: Setting up a database in a new environment can be challenging. In order to get started, you should first plan what is required. This would need you to identify the services and subscriptions that need to be activated on the cloud platform. You must also gather the requirements for your new database system in terms of what is required to replicate your database online, this may be a DB dump or it may even mean manually copying data to the cloud.
- Execute: After planning and going through the initialization of basic services, you can execute your actual migration. With the material you had gathered in the previous step, you can migrate your database using the relevant tools. It might be possible that you need to make changes in the code of your application to work with the new database, these must also be made in this step.
- Verify: The last step to your migration is to verify that all data and required contents have been copied successfully and completely. This may be done by randomly matching rows between the original and new database. It is recommended that the verification be done by a professional who is able to verify different aspects of the database.
If you are still uncertain about migrating to the cloud yourself, you may outsource this to a external company such as Intelligent Converters. They provide a large array of tools to migrate data from any database type to the cloud. They can migrate from the database of your choice to the cloud of your choice. Their converter not only migrates data and constraints but also indexes and views.
