The Doppler Quarterly Spring 2017 | Page 16

How to Plot Your Escape from Oracle Joey Jablonski Oracle’s change in pricing has caused many to consider migrating their database to a new provider. Recent news around the doubling of cost to run Oracle databases in the cloud has many enterprises searching for alternatives. The underlying database for many applications is a critical component that has had years of performance tuning, modeling and other optimizations to ensure rapid application response time. With this long-term investment, many organizations are hesitant to change the underlying database for in-house built and 3rd party applications. While there is never zero risk involved in IT changes, database migrations can be done safely and successfully while ensuring data integrity, application avail- ability and performance are maintained at peak levels for user satisfaction. When embarking on a database migration to eliminate Oracle, pre-planning is critical to ensure organizational alignment on goals, technology choices and migration methods. Achieving this alignment early in the process will ensure uniformity in migrations and proper planning and testing for low-risk migra- tions. Figure 1 shows the high-level steps necessary to organize, decide, plan and execute a database migration with the intention of changing database platforms while migrating applications to a public cloud platform. Figure 1: Database Migration Process 14 | THE DOPPLER | SPRING 2017