Oracle migration with lower cost and risk

No, and most of our clients should not. We assess the estate workload by workload. Systems with deep PL/SQL logic, RAC dependencies or vendor software certified only against Oracle usually stay, upgraded to a supported release and trimmed of unused licensed options. Workloads that use the database as plain relational storage are the natural candidates for PostgreSQL or a cloud-managed engine, where the licensing cost disappears entirely. The deliverable of our assessment is a per-workload recommendation with both scenarios costed: what it takes to keep it on Oracle properly, and what it takes to move it. Sometimes a version upgrade plus a license cleanup beats a migration on every axis, and when that is the case we say so.

Through continuous logical replication between the Oracle source and the target database. Both systems stay live during the entire transition: the source keeps serving production while every change it processes is replicated to the target in near real time. Applications are repointed in small groups, each one only after automated reconciliation confirms that the two databases agree on the data that application touches. Because the Oracle system remains the source of truth until the final switchover, rolling back means repointing a connection string to a database that never stopped running. For transaction-critical estates we rehearse that rollback before every cutover step, so the procedure under pressure is one the team has already executed.

The audit reconciles your Oracle contracts with what actually runs: enabled options and management packs against real feature usage, processor licenses against current core counts and virtualization setup, named-user metrics against active accounts, and the test or standby environments that count as licensed deployments more often than teams expect. From there we identify scope you can drop without touching functionality, workloads whose move to PostgreSQL would end their licensing cost, and consolidations that shrink the footprint of what stays. This work has removed up to €1M in yearly software licensing fees for some of our clients. Your own figure depends entirely on your contracts and usage, so we size it during the audit and present it before you commit to anything.

With measurements, captured on both sides. Schema conversion is verified object by object, then the data itself is reconciled through row counts and checksums across the full set rather than a sample. On performance, we record query plans, latency distributions and throughput on the Oracle source under real production load, then replay the same workload against the target and compare. Stored procedures and PL/SQL logic rewritten for the new engine are tested against recorded production inputs and expected outputs. Acceptance is defined numerically before the migration starts: the target must match or beat the source baseline on the agreed metrics. If a query regresses, it is tuned or the cutover for that workload waits.

It depends on the route. A version upgrade on a single estate typically runs a few weeks from rehearsal to production switch. A selective replatforming to PostgreSQL is a program of several months, because each workload goes through replication, reconciliation and performance validation before its applications are repointed, and the lowest-risk workloads move first to build confidence on real data. A full exit from a large estate spans phased moves over a year or more. What we never propose is compressing that sequence into a single weekend cutover for a transaction-critical system: the calendar buys you reversibility, and reversibility is what keeps a migration from becoming an incident.