Overview of data migration solutions
Data Transmission Service (DTS) migrates data between homogeneous or heterogeneous data sources. Its use cases include migrating data to Alibaba Cloud, migrating between Alibaba Cloud instances, and sharding and scaling databases. This topic describes the supported database types, versions, and migration types, with links to their respective configuration guides.
Billing
The data migration feature of DTS is charged. For pricing details, see Billing overview.
Migration types
Type | Description |
Schema migration | DTS migrates the schema definitions of objects from the source database to the destination database. These objects can include tables, views, triggers, stored procedures, and indexes. For schema migration between heterogeneous databases, DTS converts the schema definition syntax based on the syntax of the source and destination databases. For example, DTS converts the NUMBER data type in an Oracle database to the DECIMAL data type in a MySQL database. |
Full data migration | DTS migrates all existing data of the selected objects from the source database to the destination database. If you select only schema migration and full data migration when you configure a data migration task, new data written to the source database is not migrated to the destination database. Important To ensure data consistency, do not write new data to the source database during full data migration. For a zero-downtime migration, you must select Schema Migration, Full Data Migration, and Incremental Data Migration when you configure the task. Full data migration transfers only the existing business data (such as tables, views, and stored procedures) in the source database. It does not transfer database-internal files such as redo logs, undo logs, or archived logs. If you need to synchronize incremental changes from the source database, select incremental data migration or full data migration plus incremental data migration. Incremental data migration requires the binary log (for MySQL) or write-ahead log (WAL, for PostgreSQL) to be enabled on the source database. |
Incremental data migration | DTS captures incremental change statements for the objects to be migrated from the source database, such as from the binary log of a MySQL database. DTS then converts and applies these statements to the destination database to replicate data in real time. Note Incremental data migration runs continuously in real time and does not stop automatically. You must manually terminate or release the migration task. For more information, see Terminate a DTS instance and Release DTS instances. |
Migration plans
DTS supports the following migration solutions. You can click a specific solution based on your business requirements to view the supported versions, migration types, and configuration steps.