Environment Assessment

The outcome of your environment assessment can impact the migration strategy you choose. Therefore, ensure your migration team has a detailed understanding of the current setup very early in the process. Doing this also helps in identifying possible challenges at an early stage.

As a reference in later stages or for any troubleshooting purpose, it's useful to document the objects you do not need to migrate since you will no longer use them in Exasol.

The following section lists all the things you should consider documenting.

Data Objects

Document all the data objects you want to migrate. For instance:

• Which Schemas must be migrated?
• Tables
  • Check for potential data types that you cannot do a 1:1 mapping with Exasol, for example, BLOB types
  • Run the query in Appendix A: Data type to get an overview of all the data types used and the possible challenges
  • To get an overview of external tables and directories, run the query in Appendix D: External tables and directories
• Views
  • Check if you have Non-Standard SQL elements which are supported only by Oracle
  • To get an overview of all views, run the query in Appendix B: View texts
  • To get an overview of all materialized views, run the query in Appendix C: Materialized view texts
• Functions and Stored Procedures
  • PL/SQL code can be translated to Exasol’s PL/SQL style functions or rewritten in Exasol UDFs or into Exasol LUA Scripts
  • To get an overview of functions, procedures, and packages, run the query in Appendix E: Functions, procedures, and packages
• Triggers
  • Triggers are not supported in Exasol
• Indices
  • You don’t need to migrate any indices as Exasol creates indices automatically on the fly

ETL Processes

Document all the ETL Processes in your Oracle warehouse, such as:

• Data Integration / ETL Tools / Scheduling Tools
• Handwritten procedures for ETL / ELT processing
• Data Sources
  • Files
  • Databases
  • Applications
• For each data source document
  • Security (e.g, needed users)
  • Connectivity
  • Loading frequency / loading window
  • Network bandwidth
• Loading SLAs

BI Tools and Other Applications

Document all applications used by your current Oracle data warehouse, such as:

• BI tools
• SQL Editors
• Data Science Applications (e.g., integration to R and Python)
• Other applications which access data from the DWH

Check the connectivity for all of your existing tools to Exasol (see Ecosystem Overview). If any tool is not supported, look for alternatives tools. For example, you can use DBVisualizer or DBeaver as an alternative to Oracle SQL Developer.

Database Security

Document all the security requirements currently implemented in Oracle that must be migrated to Exasol, such as:

• Encryption of data at rest and in motion
• The users / roles and their privileges (run query in Appendix F: Privileges granted to roles/users, Appendix G: Users and their roles, and Appendix H: System privileges to get an overview)
• Are users authenticated via LDAP or Active Directory?
• Do you have Row or Column Level Security implemented?
• Auditing capabilities

For additional information, refer to the Data Security topic in the Planning Guide section.

Database Environments

Document all your existing environments and consider them for your migration plan. For example: 

• Production environment
• Pre-Production / QA environment
• Development environment

Database Operations

For your general migration planning, consider the following operational aspects and include them in your migration plan:

• General SLA requirements
• Document the current backup strategy
• Document the current disaster recovery strategy
• Document your enterprise monitoring tools