Wondering how to enable validation feature in AWS DMS? We can help you!

Here at Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to Enable validation feature in their AWS instance.

Today let’s see how our Support Engineers do this set up for our customers as a part of our Server Management Services.

How to enable validation feature in AWS DMS (Database Migration Service)

Following are the steps that our Support Engineers follow to enable validation on a new task and and existing task:

Enabling validation on a new task

1. Firstly we must open the AWS DMS console, and go to Database migration tasks.

2. Then click on Create task.

3. And enter the details for Task configuration and Task settings.

4. After that from the Task settings section, select Enable validation and Enable CloudWatch logs.

5. If needed we can configure the Advanced task settings.

6. Finally, click on Create task.

Enabling validation on an existing task

1. Firstly, we must open the AWS DMS console, and go to Database migration tasks.

2. Then select the task, and check it status to see if it’s Failed or Stopped.

3. After that go to Actions, and click on Modify.

4. Now, from the Task settings section, check Enable validation.

5. Finally click on Save.

Viewing the results of the validation

1. Firstly, we must open the AWS DMS console, and go to Database migration tasks.

2. Select the name of task.

3. And go to Table statistics section, review the results.

Re-validating tables in a task

1. Firstly, we must open the AWS DMS console, and go to Database migration tasks.

2. Select the name of task.

3. And go to Table statistics section, select the table and click on Validate again.

4. For reviewing the validation metrics, go to Database migration tasks.

5. And select the name of the task, review the Migration task metrics section.

Some Limitations of enabling validation:

1. Data validation requires the table to have a primary key or unique index.

• Primary key columns can’t be of type CLOB, BLOB, or BYTE.
• For primary key columns of type VARCHAR or CHAR, the length must be less than 1024.

2. Data validation generates additional queries against the source and target databases. We must ensure that both databases have enough resources to handle this additional load.

3. Data validation isn’t supported if a migration uses customized filtering or when consolidating several databases into one.

4. If one or more rows are being continuously modified during the validation, then AWS DMS can’t validate those rows. However, we can validate those rows manually, after the task completes.

5. Furthermore, AWS DMS do not support data validation of views.

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Conclusion

To conclude, we saw the steps that our Support Techs follow to enable validation feature in AWS DMS for our customers using AWS.