This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Amazon Aurora and load it into Snowflake. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)
What is Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database employed by organizations that are looking for better performance than they can get from MySQL at cost-effective price points. Aurora is best used as a transactional or operational database and not for analytics.
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse implemented as a managed service. It runs on the Amazon Web Services architecture using EC2 and S3 instances. Snowflake is designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to work with. It provides native support for JSON, Avro, XML, and Parquet data, and can provide access to the same data for multiple workgroups or workloads simultaneously with no contention roadblocks or performance degradation.
Getting data out of Amazon Aurora
Aurora provides several methods for extracting data; the one you use may depend upon your needs and skill set.
The most common way to get data out of any database is simply to write queries. SELECT queries allow you to pull the data you want. You can specifying filters and ordering, and limit results.
If you’re looking to export data in bulk, there may be an easier way. A handy command-line tool called mysqldump allows you to export entire tables and databases in a format you specify (i.e. delimited text, CSV, or SQL queries that would restore the database if run).
Preparing Amazon Aurora data
For every table in your Amazon Aurora database, you'll need a corresponding table in your destination database. Make sure you've pinpointed all of the fields that will be inserted into your destination, and determined the datatypes for each object (i.e. INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) to make sure they are mapped properly when they get inserted into the new table.
Preparing data for Snowflake
Depending on your data structures, you may need to prepare your data before loading. Check the supported data types for Snowflake and make sure that your data maps neatly to them.
Note that you won't need to define a schema in advance when loading JSON or XML data into Snowflake.
Loading data into Snowflake
Snowflake's documentation includes a Data Loading Overview that guides you through the task of loading your data. A data loading wizard in the Snowflake web UI may be useful if you're not loading a lot of data, but for many organizations, the limitations on that tool will make it unsuitable. You can load your data with two manual steps:
- Use the PUT command to stage files.
- Use the COPY INTO table command to load prepared data into an awaiting table.
You can copy the data from your local drive or from Amazon S3. Snowflake lets you make a virtual warehouse that can power the insertion process.
Keeping Amazon Aurora data up to date
At this point you’ve coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.
Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Aurora.
And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Aurora sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.
Other data warehouse options
Snowflake is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.
Easier and faster alternatives
If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t be alarmed. If you have all the skills necessary to go through this process, chances are building and maintaining a script like this isn’t a very high-leverage use of your time.
Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to move data from Amazon Aurora to Snowflake automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Amazon Aurora data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Snowflake data warehouse.