AWS DMS Full Load: Everything You Need to Know

In today’s world, businesses are drowning in data, and it is essential to migrate your data from one place to another. However, this process could be highly complex and time-consuming if you do not choose the right migration tool. AWS DMS is a robust migration solution for effectively and securely transferring databases to AWS. 

This blog shall focus on AWS DMS Full Load, how it works, its benefits, best practices, and alternatives such as Hevo Data. So, let’s dive in!

What is AWS DMS?

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a tool for moving data from a source to a target destination. Whether you are dealing with relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, or other data sources, AWS DMS can securely migrate your data to AWS Cloud destinations. 

Key Features of AWS DMS

1. Minimal Downtime: One significant advantage of AWS DMS is that it migrates the database while keeping the source database running. This translates to application availability for the continuity of business activities.
2. Supports various Connectors: It supports broad database support, including source and target databases such as Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and SAP ASE. 
3. Continuous Data Replication: AWS DMS can replicate all changes continuously to a target database, guaranteeing consistency in data between the target and source databases.
4. High Availability: With its built-in support for multi-AZ deployments, AWS DMS can provide high availability and durability for the migration process.

What is Full Load in AWS DMS?

In the context of AWS DMS, a “Full Load” is the initial load of all data from a source database to a target database. The full load migration phase populates the target database with a copy of the source data, guaranteeing that the target database reflects exactly what was in the source database during migration. Full Load is typically followed by ongoing replication if continuous synchronization is required.

The full load process contains the following:

1. Extract data from the source database.
2. This is the step where the data will be transformed to match the target database schema.
3. Loading the data into a target database.

How does the Full Load Work in AWS DMS?

During the full load, when data is migrated from source to destination, AWS DMS loads the tables on source data store to the tables on target. While the full load is in progress, any changes to the source data are cached on the replication server. These changes are known as cached changes.

After the load is completed, AWS DMS begins applying the cached modifications to that table. Once the table has been loaded and the cached modifications applied, AWS DMS will begin collecting changes as transactions for the ongoing replication phase.

Benefits of using AWS DMS Full Load

Full Load migration mode has the following benefits:

• Thorough Migration: Full load aims to ensure that all source data is transmitted to the target database. It is a way of setting the target environment the same way as the source before any other ongoing replication or change data capture (CDC). 
• Ease of Use: AWS DMS automates the full load process, making it easy, efficient, and faster. 
• Handling Large Databases: Businesses with large data volumes can use AWS DMS for their data needs. The full-load migration method is optimized to manage vast amounts of data efficiently.
• Data Integrity: Full Load also ensures that data transfers accurately from the source to the target database, ensuring data integrity. This is very important to applications where the data’s accuracy impacts the application’s functionality.
• Combination with Ongoing Replication: By combining full load and ongoing replication, users can ensure that all changes to the Source database, whether made during the Full Load or afterward, are continuously synched with the target database, keeping the target updated.

Best Practices for AWS DMS Full Load

You can enhance your Full Load performance by applying a few settings to optimize your data migration. The following are the key areas of Enhanced Full Load Performance improvements:

• Pre-Migration Assessment: Asses your data source thoroughly to ensure that there are no potential issues that can affect migration.
• Removal of manual configuration: The feature can automatically assess and distribute the load evenly among subtasks. If you don’t use this feature, you must manually partition the subtasks for parallel load.
• Replication settings: Change a few replication settings to enhance your full load. A few settings that you can optimize are:
  • The default value for MaxFullLoadSubTasks is 8, but it can be set to a maximum of 49. Increasing this value enables more parallelism.
  • While configuring target endpoints:
    • For dense data (not many null or duplicate values in the data), we recommend setting compression as disabled under the target endpoint settings.
    • For sparse data (many null or duplicate values in the data), we recommend setting compression as enabled under the target endpoint settings.

Alternative to AWS DMS: Hevo Data

The full load feature of AWS DMS is effective, but it requires a lot of extra configuration and optimization for efficient data migration. On the other hand, Hevo is a user-friendly, no-code platform that provides full-load data migration with a simpler procedure. In addition to the full load feature, Hevo provides other migration modes such as Change Data Capture, Delta—Timestamp, Unique Incrementing Append Only, etc. 

Other key features of hevo are:

1. Multiple Workspaces within a Domain: This feature allows users to create multiple workspaces with the same domain name.
2. ELT Pipelines: Hevo’s no-code ELT Pipelines can quickly load vast volumes of data from diverse sources into your desired destination. Then, you can use Hevo’s platform to transform your data.  
3. In-built Transformations: Features like Python code-based and Drag-and-Drop Transformations in Hevo allow you to cleanse and prepare the data. 
4. Post-Load Transformations: After loading data to the Destination, you can transform it further for analysis by configuring dbt™ Models, creating SQL Models, and combining them in Workflows.
5. Historical Data Sync: This is for both Database and SaaS sources. 
6. Flexible Data Replication Options: You can replicate entire databases, specific tables, or individual columns. You can also customize the data that you want to load. 
7. On-Demand Credit and Usage-based Pricing: On-Demand Credit helps you continue loading data without interruption, even when your Events quota is exhausted. Hevo offers very competitive tier-based pricing along with 60+ free sources.  

Conclusion

This blog includes AWS DMS Full Load, how it works, its benefits, best practices, and alternatives such as Hevo Data. To summarize, AWS DMS is a powerful data migration solution with great potential. However, it does not provide the ideal migration experience in several areas and can be tiring to implement. 

These constraints can be manually bypassed with some technological effort. Despite these efforts, the procedure can be tedious and time-consuming.

Hevo Data simplifies this procedure with an automatic two-step technique that ensures smooth migration—looking for the most straightforward approach to move data to destinations such as PostgreSQL? Try Hevo Data’s 14-day free trial.

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