Migrate an IBM Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance to an Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse

Migrate data from your on-premises IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, and eliminate the complexities of operating your data warehouse and developing data-driven applications on-premises. Run a high-performance, autonomous, highly available, and secure data warehouse while reducing administrative costs.

Architecture

In this architecture, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage is used to migrate data from an on-premises deployment of an IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance to an Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. You can use FastConnect or IPSec VPN for private connectivity between your on-premises data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

After migrating the data to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can use the built-in machine learning, analytics, and AI tools to run complex queries across multiple data types, and build sophisticated analytical models.

• Data scientists can use Oracle Data Catalog to explore, discover, and analyze data.
• Business analysts can access and visualize information.
• Developers can build data-driven applications.

The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.

Description of the illustration migrate-netezza.png

The on-premises data center shown in this architecture has the following components:

• Customer-premises equipment (CPE)

  This component is the on-premises endpoint for the VPN Connect or FastConnect interconnection between the on-premises data center and the virtual cloud network (VCN) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• IBM Netezza database

  Netezza is an RDBMS used to build large-scale data warehousing applications.

• Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Data Sync

  Use a custom or third-party data conversion tool to extract and transform the data stored in Netezza. To load the transformed data to object storage in Oracle Cloud, you can use Oracle SQL Developer or Oracle Data Sync.

  Oracle Data Integrator is another tool that you can use, either on-premises or in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using a marketplace image. Consider using this tool if you want to support ongoing data migration.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy has the following components:

• Region

  An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).

  All the resources in this architecture deployed in a single region.

• Compartment

  Compartments are cross-region logical partitions within an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Use compartments to organize your resources in Oracle Cloud, control access to the resources, and set usage quotas. To control access to the resources in a given compartment, you define policies that specify who can access the resources and what actions they can perform.

• Cloud Guard

  You can use Oracle Cloud Guard to monitor and maintain the security of your resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Cloud Guard uses detector recipes that you can define to examine your resources for security weaknesses and to monitor operators and users for risky activities. When any misconfiguration or insecure activity is detected, Cloud Guard recommends corrective actions and assists with taking those actions, based on responder recipes that you can define.

• Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets

  A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.

  In this architecture, the VCN is used as a transit network to enable private connectivity between the on-premises network and the Oracle services network.

• Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)

  The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.

• Service gateway

  The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.

• Route tables

  Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.

  In this architecture, a route table associated with the DRG routes traffic coming in from the on-premises network to the service gateway, and a route table associated with the service gateway routes the traffic bound for the on-premises network through the DRG.

• Object storage

  Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.

• Data catalog

  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalog is a fully managed, self-service data discovery and governance solution for your enterprise data. It provides data engineers, data scientists, data stewards, and chief data officers a single collaborative environment to manage the organization's technical, business, and operational metadata.

• Autonomous data warehouse with OML

  Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for data warehousing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.

Recommendations

Use the following recommendations as a starting point. Your requirements might differ from the architecture described here.

• Autonomous data warehouse

  Start with two OCPUs and one TB of storage, and enable autoscaling. This configuration ensures optimum price and performance.

• Cloud Guard

  Clone and customize the default recipes provided by Oracle to create custom detector and responder recipes. These recipes enable you to specify what type of security violations generate a warning and what actions are allowed to be performed on them. For example, you might want to detect Object Storage buckets that have visibility set to public.

  Apply Cloud Guard at the tenancy level to cover the broadest scope and to reduce the administrative burden of maintaining multiple configurations.

  You can also use the Managed List feature to apply certain configurations to detectors.

• Object storage

  Use Object Storage for database backups and for low-cost storage of other data. For maximum security, create the object storage buckets in a security-zone compartment. This ensures that the buckets can't be accessed from the public internet.

• VCN

  When you create a VCN, determine the number of CIDR blocks required and the size of each block based on the number of resources that you plan to attach to subnets in the VCN. Use CIDR blocks that are within the standard private IP address space.

  Select CIDR blocks that don't overlap with any other network (in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, your on-premises data center, or another cloud provider) to which you intend to set up private connections.

  After you create a VCN, you can change, add, and remove its CIDR blocks.

  When you design the subnets, consider your traffic flow and security requirements. Attach all the resources within a specific tier or role to the same subnet, which can serve as a security boundary.

  Use regional subnets.

Considerations

When migrating data to the Oracle Cloud, consider the following factors:

• Scalability and cost

  As long as autoscaling is enabled, you don't need to manage scaling manually for your autonomous data warehouse. Autoscaling also ensures optimum price and performance.

• Availability

  Your autonomous database is backed up automatically, and the backups are retained for 60 days. You can also create manual backups to supplement the automatic backups. Manual backups are stored in a bucket that you create in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. You can restore and recover the database to any point-in-time during the retention period. When you initiate a point-in-time recovery, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse determines and uses the backup that enables faster recovery.

• Access control

  Define suitable policies in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control who can access your resources in the cloud and the actions that they can perform.

Explore More

Learn more about migrating data to Oracle Cloud.

• To download Oracle Data Sync and for information about getting started, see the "Oracle Analytics Cloud Data Sync" section on the Oracle Analytics Cloud downloads page.
• For an overview of Oracle Data Integrator and to get started with using it, see Oracle Data Integrator.
• To get started with Oracle Cloud Guard, see Cloud Guard.