When it comes to migration, there are many factors that need to be considered to ensure successful migration. Overlooking even the tiniest of aspects can cause failures, or worse, irreversible damages to businesses. There is no doubt that data migration is a daunting task for enterprises, regardless of size.

To address these issues, Alibaba Cloud provides a convenient way for migration through its . By migrating a local database to using DTS, you can implement smooth database migration without any service interruption. In this article, we will illustrate how you can easily migrate your local data to the Alibaba Cloud RDS using DTS.

What is Data Transmission Service?

is a data exchange service that streamlines data migration, data synchronization, and data subscription. DTS is capable of handling most widely used commercial and open-sourced databases, including RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) and NoSQL. DTS supports schema migration and full migration of SQL Server data.

Data Transmission Service supports schema migration of the following objects: tables, views, table triggers, synonyms, SQL stored procedures, SQL functions, custom types, plan GUIDs, rules, and defaults.

Full migration through Data Transmission Service will migrate all the data of the migration objects in a local database to the target instance. If there are any incremental updates during the migration process, the incremental data will not be migrated to the target database. Therefore, we recommend you use Data Transmission for full data migration when no data is being written to the local business database.

Restrictions on Migration

Migrating a local database to RDS is subject to the following restrictions:

• DDL operations are not supported during migration.
• Schema migration does not support migration of assemblies, database-level stored procedures, service brokers, full-text indexes, full-text directories, distributed schemas, distributed functions, CLR scalar functions, CLR value functions, inner tables, aggregate functions, and systems.
• If object name mapping is enabled, other objects dependent on this object may fail to be migrated.

Overview of Migration Process

Note: Before the migration, create a migration account in the local database and RDS instance, create the database to be migrated in the RDS instance, and grant the read/write permissions of the database to the migration account. Different migration types need different permissions.

1.Create a migration account in the local database.

2.Grant permissions to the migration account in the local database. The required permissions are described in the table above.

3.In the RDS console, click [Migrate Database] to enter the Data Transmission interface, as shown in the figure below.

4.Click [Create Online Migration Task] to enter the Create Migration Task page, as shown in the figure below.

5.Enter the task name, local database information and target database information. Click [Authorize White List and Next], as shown in the figure below.

6.Select the migration type, select the migration object from [Migration Objects], and click > to put the migration object in Selected. Then click [Pre-check and Start], as shown in the figure below.

To modify the migration object name in the target database, click Edit on the right side of the Selected list.

7.The system displays the result of the pre-check, as shown in the figure below.

8.Click on the ! icon to check the failure details with the failed, and troubleshoot accordingly. If there are no failures, click Next.

9.After pre-check is successful, start the migration task. The migration status and progress can be viewed in the task list.

Note: To ensure security of the local database, delete the migration account in the local database and RDS instance after the data migration is complete.

That's it! You can now enjoy the benefits of automated monitoring, backup and disaster recovery capabilities with .

Visit the Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service page to discover how you can easily migrate your database to Alibaba Cloud. Or talk to our experts today to learn about the .