New Tools Ease the Pain of Database Migrations

Database migration is a growing issue as more businesses move terabytes and petabytes of data to the cloud.

In the latest real-world example, PayPay's tech team published a blog post detailing their experience migrating data warehouse workloads from on-premises to Google Cloud's BigQuery.

"As we worked through this project, it became clear that data movement is very contextual to our setup, and off-the-shelf tools had limitations in being able to seamlessly copy data to Google Cloud Platform," the authors wrote. "This was the hardest part of the whole project." 

PayPal did not say how many months it took to move 15 petabytes, only that it was "less than a year." That's in the ballpark of other major database migrations I've written about, which have ranged from six months to two years. 

Clearly, these are complex undertakings. Kelly Stirman, Google Cloud director of product management for databases, said not long ago that most IT organizations view database migrations as "about the highes…