harbourbridge

HarbourBridge: Spanner Evaluation and Migration

HarbourBridge is a stand-alone open source tool for Cloud Spanner evaluation and migration, using data from an existing PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle or DynamoDB database. The tool ingests schema and data from either a pg_dump/mysqldump file or directly from the source database, and supports both schema and data migration. For schema migration, HarbourBridge automatically builds a Spanner schema from the schema of the source database. This schema can be customized using the HarbourBridge schema assistant and a new Spanner database is created using the Spanner schema built.

For more details on schema customization and use of the schema assistant, see web/README. The rest of this README describes the command-line capabilities of HarbourBridge.

HarbourBridge is designed to simplify Spanner evaluation and migration. Certain features of relational databases, especially those that don't map directly to Spanner features, are ignored, e.g. stored functions and procedures, and sequences. Types such as integers, floats, char/text, bools, timestamps, and (some) array types, map fairly directly to Spanner, but many other types do not and instead are mapped to Spanner's STRING(MAX). In the case of DynamoDB, the schema is inferred based on a certain amount of sampled data.

View HarbourBridge as a way to get up and running fast, so you can focus on critical things like tuning performance and getting the most out of Spanner. Expect that you'll need to tweak and enhance what HarbourBridge produces.

Data Migration

HarbourBridge supports two types of data migrations:

• Minimal Downtime migration - A minimal downtime migration consists of two components, migration of existing data from the database and the stream of changes (writes and updates) that are made to the source database during migration, referred to as change database capture (CDC). Using HarbourBridge, the entire process where Datastream reads data from the source database and writes to a GCS bucket and data flow reads data from GCS bucket and writes to spanner database can be orchestrated using a unified interface. Performing schema changes on the source database during the migration is not supported. This is the suggested mode of migration for most databases.

  Please note that in order to perform minimal downtime migration for PostgreSQL database a user needs to create a publication and replication slot as mentioned here

• Bulk Migration - HarbourBridge reads data from source database and writes it to the database created in Cloud Spanner. Changes which happen to the source database during the bulk migration may or may not be written to Spanner. To achieve consistent version of data, stop writes on the source while migration is in progress, or use a read replica. Performing schema changes on the source database during the migration is not supported. While there is no technical limit on the size of the database, it is recommended for migrating moderate-size datasets to Spanner(up to about 100GB).

For some quick starter examples on how to run HarbourBridge, take a look at Quickstart Guide.

HarbourBridge automatically determines the cloud project to use, and generates a new Spanner database name. Command-line flags can be used to explicitly set the Spanner instance or database name. See Command line flags.

WARNING: Please check that permissions for the Spanner instance used by HarbourBridge are appropriate. Spanner manages access control at the database level, and the database created by HarbourBridge will inherit default permissions from the instance. All data written by HarbourBridge is visible to anyone who can access the created database.

As it processes the data, HarbourBridge reports on progress, provides stats on the schema and data conversion steps, and an overall assessment of the quality of the conversion. It also generates a schema file, report files and a session file (and a bad-data file if data was dropped). See Files Generated by HarbourBridge. Details of how source database's schema is mapped to Spanner can be found in the Schema Conversion section.

This tool is part of the Cloud Spanner Ecosystem, a community contributed and supported open source repository. Please report issues and send pull requests. See the HarbourBridge Whitepaper for a discussion of our plans for the tool.

Note that the HarbourBridge tool is not an officially supported Google product and is not officially supported as part of the Cloud Spanner product.

Quickstart Guide

Before you begin

Complete the steps described in Set up, which covers creating and setting a default Google Cloud project, enabling billing, enabling the Cloud Spanner API, and setting up OAuth 2.0 to get authentication credentials to use the Cloud Spanner API.

In particular, ensure that you run

gcloud auth application-default login

to set up your local development environment with authentication credentials.

Set the GCLOUD_PROJECT environment variable to your Google Cloud project ID:

export GCLOUD_PROJECT=my-project-id

If you do not already have a Cloud Spanner instance, or you want to use a separate instance specifically for running HarbourBridge, then create a Cloud Spanner instance by following the "Create an instance" instructions on the Quickstart using the console guide. HarbourBridge will create a database for you, but it will not create a Spanner instance.

Install Go (download) on your development machine if it is not already installed, configure the GOPATH environment variable if it is not already configured, and test your installation.

Installing HarbourBridge

HarbourBridge on gCloud (Linux Only)

Note: HarbourBridge on gCloud is currently only supported on the Linux platform. MacOS is currently not supported.

You can directly run HarbourBridge from the gCloud CLI instead of building it from source. In order to start using HarbourBridge via Gcloud, the user can install the harbourbridge component of gcloud by executing the below command:

gcloud components install harbourbridge

Note: If you installed the gcloud CLI through the apt or yum package managers, you can also install additional gcloud CLI components using those same package managers. For example, to install with apt, run the following:

sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk-harbourbridge

Once installed, the HarbourBridge commands will be available under the gcloud alpha spanner migration surface. For example, to start the HarbourBridge UI, run the following command:

gcloud alpha spanner migration web

The complete CLI reference for the spanner migration gCloud surface can be found here.

Note: Detailed instructions on how to install a new component in gCloud can be found here.

HarbourBridge from Source

You can make a copy of the HarbourBridge codebase from the github repository and use "go run".

git clone https://github.com/cloudspannerecosystem/harbourbridge
cd harbourbridge
go run github.com/cloudspannerecosystem/harbourbridge help

Examples below assume that harbourbridge alias is set as following

alias harbourbridge="go run github.com/cloudspannerecosystem/harbourbridge"

This workflow also allows you to modify or customize the HarbourBridge codebase.

Running HarbourBridge

To use the tool on a PostgreSQL database called mydb, run

pg_dump mydb > mydb.pg_dump
harbourbridge schema-and-data -source=postgresql < mydb.pg_dump

To use the tool on a MySQL database called mydb, run

mysqldump mydb > mydb.mysqldump
harbourbridge schema-and-data -source=mysql < mydb.mysqldump

To use the tool on a DynamoDB database, run

harbourbridge schema-and-data -source=dynamodb

Note: HarbourBridge accepts pg_dump/mysqldump's standard plain-text format, but not archive or custom formats. More details on HarbourBridge example usage can be found here:

• PostgreSQL example usage
• MySQL example usage
• DynamoDB example usage
• CSV example usage
• SQL Server example usage
• Oracle DB example usage

This command will use the cloud project specified by the GCLOUD_PROJECT environment variable, automatically determine the Cloud Spanner instance associated with this project, convert the source schema to a Spanner schema (For MySQL/Postgres) or infer a schema from the DynamoDB instance, create a new Cloud Spanner database with this schema, and finally, populate this new database with the data from the source database. If the project has multiple instances, then list of available instances will be shown and you will have to pick one of the available instances and set the instance flag in target-profile. The new Cloud Spanner database will have a name of the form {SOURCE}_{DATE}_{RANDOM}, where{SOURCE} is the value of the source flag,{DATE}is today's date, and{RANDOM} is a random suffix for uniqueness.

See the Troubleshooting Guide for help on debugging issues.

HarbourBridge also generates several files when it runs: a schema file, report files (with detailed analysis of the conversion), a session file and a bad data file (if any data was dropped).

Setting up the emulator

To run migrations against a local instance without having to connect to Cloud spanner each time follow the following steps:

• Start the emulator:

  gcloud emulators spanner start
  

• Set the SPANNER_EMULATOR_HOST:

  export SPANNER_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:9010
  

Sample Dump Files

If you don't have ready access to a PostgreSQL or MySQL database, some example dump files can be found here. The files cart.pg_dump and cart.mysqldump contain pg_dump and mysqldump output for a very basic shopping cart application (just two tables, one for products and one for user carts). The files singers.pg_dump and singers.mysqldump contain pg_dump and mysqldump output for a version of the Cloud Spanner singers example. To use HarbourBridge on cart.pg_dump, download the file locally and run

harbourbridge schema -source=postgresql < cart.pg_dump

Verifying Results

Once the tool has completed, you can verify the new database and its content using the Google Cloud Console. Go to the Cloud Spanner Instances page, select your Spanner instance, and then find the database created by HarbourBridge and select it. This will list the tables created by HarbourBridge. Select a table, and take a look at its schema and data. Next, go to the query page, and try some SQL statements. For example

SELECT COUNT(*) from mytable

to check the number of rows in table mytable.

Next Steps

The tables created by HarbourBridge provide a starting point for evaluation of Spanner. While they preserve much of the core structure of your PostgreSQL/MySQL schema and data, many key features have been dropped, including functions, sequences, procedures,triggers, and views. For DynamoDB, the conversion from schemaless to schema is focused on the use-case where customers use DynamoDB in a consistent, structured way with a fairly well defined set of columns and types.

As a result, the out-of-the-box performance you get from these tables could be slower than what you get from PostgreSQL/MySQL/DynamoDB.

To improve performance, also consider using Interleaved Tables to tune performance.

View HarbourBridge as a base set of functionality for Spanner evalution that can be readily expanded. Consider forking and modifying the codebase to add the functionality you need. Please file issues and send PRs for fixes and new functionality. See our backlog of open issues. Our plans and aspirations for developing HarbourBridge further are outlined in the HarbourBridge Whitepaper.

You can also change the way HarbourBridge behaves by directly editing the pg_dump/mysqldump output. For example, suppose you want to try out different primary keys for a table. First run pg_dump/mysqldump and save the output to a file. Then modify (or add) the relevant ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT ... PRIMARY KEY ... statement in the pg_dump/mysqldump output file so that the primary keys match what you need. Then run HarbourBridge on the modified pg_dump/mysqldump output.

Files Generated by HarbourBridge

HarbourBridge generates several files as it runs:

• Schema file (ending in schema.txt): contains the generated Spanner schema, interspersed with comments that cross-reference to the relevant source schema definitions.

• Session file (ending in session.json): contains all schema and data conversion state endcoded as JSON. It is basically a snapshot of the session.

• Structured Report file (ending in structured_report.json): contains a JSON based structured analysis of the source to Spanner migration. The structured report can be used to in-depth analysis of Harbourbridge findings via BI tools. For a detailed description of each element of a report, refer to Elements of a Report.

• Text Report file (ending in report.txt): contains a detailed analysis of the source to Spanner migration, including table-by-table stats and an analysis of Source types that don't cleanly map onto Spanner types. Note that source types that don't have a corresponding Spanner type are mapped to STRING(MAX).

• Bad data file (ending in dropped.txt): contains details of data that could not be converted and written to Spanner, including sample bad-data rows. If there is no bad-data, this file is not written (and we delete any existing file with the same name from a previous run).

By default, these files are prefixed by the name of the Spanner database (with a dot separator). The file prefix can be overridden using the -prefix option.

HarbourBridge UI

HarbourBridge UI provides a unified interface for the migration wherein it gives users the flexibility to modify the generated spanner schema and run end to end migration from a single interface. It provides the capabilities of editing table details like columns, primary key, foreign key, indexes, etc and provides insights on the schema conversion along with highlighting important issues and suggestions.

Detailed guide on how to use HarbourBridge UI can be found here.

HarbourBridge CLI (command line interface)

HarbourBridge CLI follows subcommands structure with the the following general syntax:

harbourbridge <subcommand> flags

Getting Help

The command harbourbridge help displays the available subcommands.

    commands   list all subcommand names
    help   describe subcommands and their syntax

To get help on individual subcommands, use

    harbourbridge help <subcommand>

This will print the usage pattern, a few examples, and a list of all available subcommand flags.

Subcommands

harbourbridge schema

This subcommand can be used to perform schema conversion and report on the quality of the conversion. The generated schema mapping file (session.json) can be then further edited using the HarbourBridge web UI to make custom edits to the destination schema. This session file is then passed to the data subcommand to perform data migration while honoring the defined schema mapping. HarbourBridge also generates Spanner schema which users can modify manually and use directly as well.

harbourbridge data

This subcommand will perform data migration and report on the quality of the same. Rows which could not be migrated are reported in dropped.txt file. This subcommand requires users to pass the session file (which contains schema mapping) generated by either the schema subcommand or web UI.

harbourbridge schema-and-data

This subcommand will generate a schema as well as perform data migration and report on the quality of both schema migration and data migration. This subcommand can be used to do a quick evaluation for the migration and get started quickly on Spanner.

harbourbridge web

This subcommand will run the Harbourbridge UI locally. The UI can be used to perform assisted schema and data migration.

Command line flags

This section describes the flags common across all the subcommands. For flags specific to a give subcommand run harbourbridge help <subcommand>.

-source Required flag. Specifies the source source. Supported sources are 'postgres', 'mysql', 'dynamodb' and 'csv'(only in data mode).

-target Optional flag. Specifies the target database. Defaults to 'spanner' , which is the only supported target database today.

-prefix Specifies a file prefix for the report, schema, and bad-data files written by the tool. If no file prefix is specified, the name of the Spanner database (plus a '.') is used.

-v or -verbose Specifies verbose mode. This will cause HarbourBridge to output detailed messages about the conversion.

-skip-foreign-keys Controls whether we add foreign key constraints after data migration is complete. This flag cannot be used with schema-only mode, and does not affect the generation of foreign key statements during schema processing i.e. foreign key constraints will still appear in the generated Spanner DDL files.

-session Specifies a session file that contains all schema and data conversion state endcoded as JSON.

-source-profile Specifies detailed parameters for the source database such as connection parameters. See Source Profile for details.

-target-profile Specifies detailed parameters for the target database. See Target Profile for details.

-dry-run Controls whether we run the migration in dry run mode or not. Using this mode generates session file, schema and report for schema and/or data conversion without actually creating the Spanner database.

Source Profile

HarbourBridge accepts the following params for --source-profile, specified as "key1=value1,key2=value,..." pairs:

file Specifies the full path of the file to use for reading source database schema and/or data. This param is optional, and the file can also be piped to stdin, if available locally.

If the file is located in Google Cloud Storage (GCS), you can use the following format: file=gs://{bucket_name}/{path/to/file}. Please ensure you have read pemissions to the GCS bucket you would like to use.

format Specifies the format of the file. This param is also optional, and defaults to dump. This may be extended in future to support other formats such as csv, avro etc.

host Specifies the host name for the source database. If not specified in case of direct connection to the source database, HarbourBridge fetches it from the environment variables(Example usage).

user Specifies the user for the source database. If not specified in case of direct connection to the source database, HarbourBridge fetches it from the environment variables(Example usage).

dbName Specifies the name of the source database. If not specified in case of direct connection to the source database, HarbourBridge fetches it from the environment variables(Example usage).

port Specifies the port for the source database. If not specified in case of direct connection to the source database, HarbourBridge fetches it from the environment variables(Example usage).

password Specifies the password for the source database. If not specified in case of direct connection to the source database, HarbourBridge fetches it from the environment variables(Example usage).

streamingCfg Optional flag. Specifies the file path for streaming config. Please note that streaming migration is only supported for MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL databases currently.

Target Profile

HarbourBridge accepts the following options for --target-profile, specified as "key1=value1,key2=value,..." pairs:

dbName Specifies the name of the Spanner database to create. This must be a new database. If dbName is not specified, HarbourBridge creates a new unique dbName.

instance Specifies the Spanner instance to use. The new database will be created in this instance. If not specified, the tool automatically determines an appropriate instance using gcloud.

dialect Specifies the dialect of Spanner database. By default, Spanner databases are created with GoogleSQL dialect. You can override the same by setting dialect=PostgreSQL in the -target-profile. Learn more about support for PostgreSQL dialect in Cloud Spanner here.

Schema Conversion

Details on HarbourBridge schema conversion can be found here:

• PostgreSQL schema conversion
• MySQL schema conversion
• DynamoDB schema conversion
• SQL Server schema conversion
• Oracle DB schema conversion

Data Migration

Data Conversion

HarbourBridge converts data from the source to Spanner data based on the Spanner schema it constructs. Conversion for most data types is fairly straightforward, but several types deserve discussion. Details on HarbourBridge data conversion can be found here:

• PostgreSQL data conversion
• MySQL data conversion
• DynamoDB data conversion
• CSV data conversion
• SQL Server data conversion

Data Migration Recommendations

• While using direct connect, it is recommended to use a secondary/read replica to ensure consistency and that and avoid impact from the load on the primary.

Troubleshooting Guide

The following steps can help diagnose common issues encountered while running HarbourBridge.

1. Verify source profile configuration

First, check that the source profile is correctly configured to connect to your database. Source profile configuration varies depending on the database.

1.1 Direct access to PostgreSQL

See Directly connecting to a PostgreSQL database for troubleshooting direct access to PostgreSQL.

1.2 Direct access to MySQL

See Directly connecting to a MySQL database for troubleshooting direct access to MySQL.

1.3 Direct access to DynamoDB

See DynamoDB example usage for troubleshooting direct access to DynamoDB.

1.4 Direct access to SQL Server

See SQL Server example usage for troubleshooting direct access to SQL Server.

1.5 Direct access to Oracle DB

See Oracle DB example usage for troubleshooting direct access to Oracle.

2. Generating dump files

2.1 Generating pg_dump file

If you are using pg_dump , check that pg_dump is correctly configured to connect to your PostgreSQL database. Note that pg_dump uses the same options as psql to connect to your database. See the psql and pg_dump documentation.

Access to a PostgreSQL database is typically configured using the PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER, PGDATABASE environment variables, which are standard across PostgreSQL utilities.

It is also possible to configure access via pg_dump's command-line options --host, --port, and --username.

2.2 mysqldump

If you are using mysqldump, check that mysqldump is correctly configured to connect to your MySQL database via the command-line options --host, --port, and --user. Note that mysqldump uses the same options as mysql to connect to your database. See the mysql and mysqldump documentation.

Next, verify that pg_dump/mysqldump is generating plain-text output. If your database is small, try running

{ pg_dump/mysqldump } > file

and look at the output file. It should be a plain-text file containing SQL commands. If your database is large, consider just dumping the schema via the --schema-only for pg_dump and --no-data for mysqldump command-line option.

pg_dump/mysqldump can export data in a variety of formats, but HarbourBridge only accepts plain format (aka plain-text). See the pg_dump documentation and mysqldump documentation for details about formats.

3. Debugging HarbourBridge

The HarbourBridge tool can fail for a number of reasons.

3.1 No space left on device

HarbourBridge needs to read the pg_dump/mysqldump output twice, once to build a schema and once for data ingestion. When pg_dump/mysqldump output is directly piped to HarbourBridge, stdin is not seekable, and so we write the output to a temporary file. That temporary file is created via Go's ioutil.TempFile. On many systems, this creates a file in /tmp, which is sometimes configured with minimal space. A simple workaround is to separately run pg_dump/mysqldump and write its output to a file in a directory with sufficient space. For example, if the current working directory has space, then:

{ pg_dump/mysqldump } > tmpfile
harbourbridge < tmpfile

Make sure you cleanup the tmpfile after HarbourBridge has been run. Another option is to set the location of Go's TempFile e.g. by setting the TMPDIR environment variable.

3.2 Unparsable dump output

HarbourBridge uses the pg_query_go library for parsing pg_dump and pingcap parser for parsing mysqldump. It is possible that the pg_dump/mysqldump output is corrupted or uses features that aren't parseable. Parsing errors should generate an error message of the form Error parsing last 54321 line(s) of input.

3.2 Credentials problems

HarbourBridge uses standard Google Cloud credential mechanisms for accessing Cloud Spanner. If this is mis-configured, you may see errors containing "unauthenticated", or "cannot fetch token", or "could not find default credentials". You might need to run gcloud auth application-default login. See the Before you begin section for details.

3.4 Can't create database

In this case, the error message printed by the tool should help identify the cause. It could be an API permissions issue. For example, the Cloud Spanner API may not be appropriately configured. See Before you begin section for details. Alternatively, you have have hit the limit on the number of databases per instances (currently 100). This can occur if you re-run the HarbourBridge tool many times, since each run creates a new database. In this case you'll need to delete some databases.

4. Database-Specific Issues

The schema, report, and bad-data files generated by HarbourBridge contain detailed information about the schema and data conversion process, including issues and problems encountered.

5. Reporting Issues

Known Issues

Please refer to the issues section on Github for a full list of known issues.

Schema Conversion

• Loading dump files from SQL Server, Oracle and DynamoDB is not supported
• Schema Only Mode does not create foreign keys
• Migration of check constraints, functions and views is not supported
• Schema recommendations are based on static analysis of the schema only
• PG Spanner dialect support is limited, and is not currently available on the UI

Minimal Downtime Data Migrations

• Minimal downtime migrations for SQL Server and DynamoDB are not supported
• Requires a direct connection to the database to run and hence will not be available while reading from Dump files.
• Expected downtime will be in the order of a few minutes while the pipeline gets flushed.
• This flow depends on Datastream, and all the constraints of Datastream apply to these migrations
• Migration from sharded databases is not natively supported
• Edits to primary keys and unique indexes are supported, but the user will need to ensure that the new primary key/unique indexes retain uniqueness in the data. This is not verified during updation of the keys
• When the Spanner table PKs are different from the source keys, updates on the spanner PK columns can potentially lead to data inconsistencies. The updates can be potentially treated as a new insert or update some different row
• Interleaved rows and rows with foreign key constraints are retried 500 times. Exhaustion of retries results in these rows being pushed into a dead letter queue.
• Conversion to Spanner ARRAY type is currently not supported
• MySQL types BIT and TIME are not converted correctly
• PostgreSQL types bit, bit varying, bytea and time not converted correctly.

Access Control

• HarbourBridge does not support database roles and privileges. If users wish to use Spanner fine-grained access control as an IAM principal, then they can manually create database roles, grant the appropriate memberships and privileges to these roles, and grant access to database roles to the IAM principal. Alternatively, users can grant database-level access to an IAM principal.