Migrating from Amazon Aurora MySQL without SUPERUSER privileges

When you create and run a migration job with an Amazon Aurora MySQL source or sources that don't allow SUPERUSER privileges, the migration can require additional steps.

Create the Amazon Aurora MySQL migration job

Make sure you consider the following requirements and adjust your migration process:

  1. MySQL limits the source hostname definition to 60 characters. Amazon Aurora databases hostnames will typically be longer than 60 characters. If this is the case for the database you are migrating, configure a DNS redirect to create a CNAME record that associates your domain name with the domain name of your Amazon Aurora database instance. For more information about setting up DNS CNAME, see the Cloud DNS documentation or the AWS Route53 documentation.

  2. Binary logs must be stored on standard block storage and cannot be stored on Amazon S3.

  3. Creating a continuous migration job with a manual dump provided requires GTID to be enabled. GTID_MODE must be either ON, OFF, or OFF_PERMISSIVE. The GTID_MODE value of ON_PERMISSIVE isn't supported.

  4. To take the initial full dump, stop MySQL Amazon Aurora writes at the source database for approximately 20 seconds.

  5. Database Migration Service can't migrate data from an Amazon Aurora read-only replica instance of a MySQL database cluster because binary log files can't be retrieved from the instance. For more information, see the Amazon documentation about configuring Aurora MySQL binary logging.

Run the migration job

To take the initial full dump, stop MySQL Amazon Aurora writes at the source database for approximately 20 seconds. You can use a script that finds write activities to verify that all writing to the source database is stopped.

Indication of when to stop and resume writes is in the status and substatus of the migration job. The status changes can be tracked in the API, Console or directly in Cloud Monitoring:

  1. After the status changes to Starting | Waiting for source writes to stop, writing should be stopped to the source database. Database Migration Service identifies that the writing stopped, and the status changes to Running | Preparing the dump.

  2. After the status changes to Running | Full dump in progress, it's safe to resume writing to the source database.

Database Migration Service keeps trying to take the initial dump for approximately 20 minutes. If writes haven't been stopped, or if writes are resumed before the status update, then the process fails and returns an error describing the cause of the failure.