Data Ingestion

The 11 Best Data Migration Solutions

Written by 
JD Prater
October 18, 2022

One of the main issues with data migrations is the high risk of problems with data integrity and quality. This is a crucial issue because problems could have unnoticed downstream effects during testing, which could have a significant impact on customers. As a result, you need to find a simple, dependable, and cost-effective data migration solution that alleviates many of these concerns.

What is Data Migration?

Data migration is the process of ingesting data between one data storage system or application into another. It's mission critical when businesses need application migration, server or storage equipment replacements, maintenance or upgrades, website consolidation, disaster recovery, and data center relocation.

data migration process
Data migration process

The Best Data Migration Solutions

It is critical to ensure the security and integrity of the data during the data migration process. As a result, you should carefully analyze and select the best data migration solution, as well as have a solid data migration plan. Selecting the right platform can mean the difference between a smooth migration and one riddled with bugs, data leaks, and data integrity issues.

1. Informatica

Informatica is widely used as a data migration tool. Lots of enterprises run their software on legacy infrastructure and at some point run into limitations associated with them. The large databases they use at that time make it extremely difficult to switch to the latest infrastructure and have a list of challenges. 

Informatica is great at addressing these challenges. It allows developers to create rule-based workflows that can be used to migrate any amount of data from old to the new infrastructure. Since Informatica is so successful at this, there is always use cases for reference and trained resources for executing a project.

“Informatica data management cloud is a one stop solution for all the ETL needs and have all the required features to migrate data end to end including complex transformations. The availability of the whole package on cloud ease the initial setup.” Source: User in Education Management

2. Hevo Data

Hevo allows you to replicate data in near real-time from 150+ sources to the destination of your choice including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, and Firebolt. Without writing a single line of code. Finding patterns and opportunities is easier when you don’t have to worry about maintaining the pipelines. So, with Hevo as your data pipeline platform, maintenance is one less thing to worry about.

“Data migration is made simple and intuitive without having to write one line of code. Sometimes code is necessary for data transformation and modeling, which is made easy with built-in Python and SQL code editors.” Source

3. Osmos

Hundreds of companies uses Osmos to solve their first mile data ingestion problems. To accomplish this, we've eliminated the headaches of migrating customer data by teaching our AI-powered data transformation engine how to automatically clean it, fit it into the right formats, and then send it where it needs to go. Cut your time, effort, and costs with no-code ETL pipelines and self-serve data uploaders.

"With Osmos, we can migrate customers onto our system faster and exceed their expectations. That's all the more better for their customer experience." Bri Williams - Senior Compliance and Research Specialist

Since partnering with Osmos, Bri and the KlickTrack team streamlined their customer data onboarding process leading to:

  • Faster time-to-value for customers: Osmos automated a lot of the manual data wrangling freeing up the Customer Success team to be more hands on and focus their efforts on customer experience.
  • Reduced data inaccuracies: Osmos’ no-code data transformations offer much needed repeatability that makes it easy for nontechnical, internal users to upload clean, validated data each time.
  • Improved compliance: With fewer data errors, falling out of compliance due to messy data is no longer a concern. Bri now focuses on more important business matters.

4. Matillion

Matillion makes the world’s data useful with an easy-to-use, cloud-native data integration and transformation platform.

Optimized for modern enterprise data teams, only Matillion is built on native integrations to cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Delta Lake on Databricks, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Azure Synapse to enable new levels of efficiency and productivity across any organization.

“User Friendly (but simple) user interface is big plus point. Tools which I have used are either power full with complex User interface or simple and basic. Because of simple user interface and drag and drop functionality it provides various components right from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and also can execute python, R scripts or custom programs. This enables users / developer to learn it very quickly than any other tool or scripts.” Mandar D. - Associate Vice President

5. Talend

With Talend Open Studio, you can begin building basic data pipelines in no time. Execute simple ETL and data integration tasks, get graphical profiles of your data, and manage files  — from a locally installed, open-source environment that you control.

Talend Open Studio for Data Integration is a fully functional open source application that you can download and use for your data migration project. It is packed with productivity-boosting features that help organizations efficiently design and execute data migration projects, including:

  • An integrated graphical development environment with extensive drag-and-drop functionality, robust modeling and job management tools, and a unified repository that facilitates the efficient reuse of components across projects.
  • The largest set of data connectors of any integration software on the market. More than 900+ connectors and components allow for easy bridging of data sources and targets of all types.
  • Rich built-in functionality for data cleansing and data transformation, enabling you to migrate your data to the right form as well as the right place.
“Easy to create and test, given a visual progression of migration.” Alessandro A. - Solution Developer

6. Astera

Astera Centerprise is an on-premise data integration solution running on the Windows platform. It is mostly used by medium and large enterprises to migrate complex datasets and modernize legacy systems. Among key clients are Novartis (number 4 in Fortune Magazine’s Most Admired Pharmaceutical companies), Bank of America, and Wells Fargo Bank, to name a few.

“We need to pull data from a wide variety of sources, including text, reports, log files, PDF, Excel, and various databases. There are a number of products on the market which can do this, but we went with Astera because it’s interface is very user friendly. You can drag and drop components to pull data from any source and then manipulate either all of the data or individual fields the same way. This flexibility was obtained without any programming, and since the interface is similar to Microsoft products, there was not much of a learning curve. I love that I don't have to have someone fully trained in SQL code and SSIS in order to develop high quality solutions.” Andre B., Senior Database Manager

7. StarfishETL

StarfishETL is loaded with pre-built capabilities, but it's not limited by them. You have the power to set up your project any way you desire to get the data results that fit your business. Add custom fields in our Cloud wizard, or use the on-premises tool for more advanced personalization.

What I must highlight the most about StarfishETL is that it is effortless. The interface is very user-friendly. None of the employees has had any problems understanding the functions, even though we use the software in different departments and with different experiences.

"The transfer of data and information is orderly and so simple that it is fantastic. It saves us a lot of time and effort. I can even migrate information and data with various programming languages. It is a wonderful thing." Ronald L.- Developer

8. Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is a standard online data migration tool to transfer data over a network (internet, ER, or VPN). Whereas with offline data migration, users physically ship data-transfer devices from their organization to an Azure Data Center.

If you want to migrate your data lake or enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to Microsoft Azure, consider using Azure Data Factory. Azure Data Factory is well-suited to the following scenarios:

  • Big data workload migration from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or an on-premises Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to Azure
  • EDW migration from Oracle Exadata, Netezza, Teradata, or Amazon Redshift to Azure

Azure Data Factory can move petabytes (PB) of data for data lake migration, and tens of terabytes (TB) of data for data warehouse migration.

“We use Azure data factory to pull data from multiple sources and import it into our data warehouses. We have many disparate data sources that rarely share a similar format. Using ADF, we can pull in the data automatically, normalize it, run queries against the current DW, import it into our DW, and archive files in cold storage. It's truly a lifesaver for anyone who prefers points and clicks to code.” Shaun B. - Solution Engineer / Client Sales Support IV

9. AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service designed to make it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics.

“We heavily rely on AWS Glue for cataloging our data objects (tables and views); we utilize AWS Glue in all of our data pipelines and use it to sync external and internal data sources and auto-generate SQL-based ETL based on AWS Glue catalog objects.” Rotem F., VP Data Engineering and Analytics

10. IBM Lift

IBM Lift is a tool provided to migrate on-premise databases to IBM CloudIBM Lift makes it easier to quickly, securely and reliably migrate your database from on-premises data centers to an IBM Cloud® data property. It is designed to enable secure and rapid migration to the cloud with zero downtime.

Take your entire database to the IBM Cloud. It's a two-step process: convert your schema and migrate your data. To convert your schema, start by downloading the IBM Database Conversion Workbench. The workbench will walk you through the process of converting your source database DDL so that it is compatible with the target. The workbench will also produce a report that tells you where your action is required. Once your schema is in place, you'll use the Lift CLI to migrate your data.

“Even though it can be hectic to migrate data into the cloud with IBM Lift, the support team is free and highly knowledgeable. Also, IBM Lift is well documented in detail explaining all methods to migrate data easily.” Brian Jenkins - Director of Financial Planning and Analysis

Alooma (Acquired by Google Cloud)

Alooma helps enterprise companies streamline database migration in the cloud with an innovative data pipeline tool that enables them to move their data from multiple sources to a single data warehouse.

“It is one of the simple ways to integrate various systems. We used this mainly because it had salesforce integration to Snowflake. Another feature which was important to us was CDC which allowed us to replicate Postgresql to snowflake.” Shridhar P. - Technical Architect

The Best No-Code Data Migration Solution

Osmos offers the best no-code data migration solutions for bringing in clean customer data into your application. Now you can migrate customer data into your application without the errors, headaches, and long dev cycles. Learn how you can reduce data migration time by up to 80% with flexible and configurable solutions today.

Should You Build or Buy a Data Importer?

But before you jump headfirst into building your own solution make sure you consider these eleven often overlooked and underestimated variables.

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JD Prater

Marketing