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Three simple steps- How you can migrate from your own premise data warehouse to Cloud data warehouse
Migrating from your own premise data warehouse requires a considerable investment in resources and time. From replanning your data model task scheduling in a different platform to handling changes in the application’s database driver, many things should be considered before and during the migration.
Therefore, a strategic approach is needed to compute this process. This article is intended to provide the complete procedure of migrating from a data warehouse to a Cloud in three simple steps.
Before knowing the three simple steps, you should see why a Cloud data warehouse is more crucial for your business data.
On-premise vs. Cloud
Any system collecting data from a wide range of sources is a data warehouse. It is the best solution for business intelligence and analytical reporting.
On- premise data warehouse works on onsite servers and helps in collecting, storing, and analyzing data. Hardware infrastructure management is required for this.
The businesses may deploy their data warehouse on-premise, in the Cloud, or a combination of the two depending upon their pros and cons. However, recently, Cloud has been leaving on- premise behind due to the following reasons:
- Upfront cost: Hardware infrastructure demands upfront cost while working with an on-premise data warehouse not required in a Cloud data warehouse.
- Ongoing cost: On- premise data warehouses need upgrade and maintenance costs while Cloud data warehouse deals with the pay-as-you-go model.
- Performance: On-premises data architecture is an extract, transform, load (ETL) while Cloud gives leverage by working on extract, load, and transform (ETL).
- Flexibility: Cloud provides a design for more prominent data formats and structures than the traditional data warehouse.
- Scale: Scaling an extensive dataset is quickly done by Cloud, where you will struggle with a conventional data warehouse.
How you can migrate from your own premise data to your new cloud Data warehouse
The migration process to Cloud is gradual and not one time. So, here are the three simple steps:
Migrate your existing data
In this step, you have to migrate your existing data to the new data warehouse, so you don’t lose your historical data.
Choose any good Cloud DB available in the market like Azzure, Redshift, Snowflake and copy your data there.
Note: You can choose anyone and you can use it as your data warehouse
As a one-time activity, you have to migrate your historical data into your new data warehouse.
The key challenges here are:-
- Choosing the proper infrastructure: Copying smaller datasets and migrating in different Cloud BD is recommended.
- Copy all your existing data: make sure to migrate every data, so you don’t lose anything.
Migrate ETL
You need to set up an ongoing replication process. While migrating the data, your ETL might still be pointing to the old data warehouse. You may have to change the configuration or rewire the database to remove this.
Migrate BI
The last step is to migrate BI and analytics infrastructure. It would help if you again changed the configuration to point to the new data warehouse. After this step, you can analyze your new and old data in a new data warehouse five times faster.
Final word
A traditional data warehouse consists of a large amount of data for all the business areas. Hence, it would help if you migrated them step by step and not all at a time. If the result is a failure, take extra care while undertaking the design changes.
This incremental approach gives you access to the old data warehouse while synchronizing at the Cloud data warehouse.