Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service (DTS) is a real-time data streaming service. DTS supports data transmission between data sources such as relational database management system (RDBMS) databases, NoSQL databases, and online analytical processing (OLAP) databases. DTS provides the data synchronization, data migration, change tracking, data integration, and data processing features. This allows you to manage data within a secure, scalable, and high-availability architecture.

Introduction to DTS (video)

Benefits

Compared with traditional data migration and synchronization tools, DTS has the following advantages: high compatibility, high performance, security, reliability, and ease of use. This helps you simplify data transmission and focus on your application development. DTS provides the following benefits:

  • Ease of use

    • The DTS console is a visual management interface that helps you use DTS.
    • DTS console provides a wizard-like process that allows you to create DTS tasks with ease.
  • Diverse features

    • DTS allows you to migrate or synchronize data between heterogeneous databases that run on different database engines and have different architectures.
    • DTS provides multiple data replication modes, including data migration, data synchronization, data integration, and change tracking.
  • High performance

    • DTS uses servers with high specifications to ensure the performance of each data synchronization or migration instance.
    • DTS has its core infrastructure optimized and can achieve a peak data transmission rate of 70 MB/s. The peak records per second (RPS) can reach 350,000 rows per second if each row contains 0.2 KB of data.
    • DTS supports concurrent compressed data transmission that minimizes the bandwidth utilization.
  • High security and reliability

    • DTS supports disaster recovery of nodes. A failed task connection can be recovered within seconds.
    • DTS supports resumable transmission to resolve transmission interruptions caused by exceptions such as hardware and network failures.
    • DTS allows you to manage access to DTS tasks with fine-grained custom policies created by using Resource Access Management (RAM).
    • DTS supports data verification to ensure data integrity and consistency between the source and destination databases.

For more information about DTS, see Benefits and Scenarios.

Features

FeatureDescriptionReferences
Data synchronizationYou can use DTS to synchronize data between data sources in real time. This feature is suitable for the following scenarios: active geo-redundancy, geo-disaster recovery, zone-disaster recovery, cross-border data synchronization, query load balancing, cloud-based business intelligence (BI) systems, and real-time data warehousing.
Data migrationYou can use DTS to migrate data between homogeneous and heterogeneous data sources. This feature is suitable for the following scenarios: data migration to Alibaba Cloud, data migration between databases within Alibaba Cloud, and database splitting or scale-out.
Note The data migration feature can achieve data synchronization in specific scenarios. However, data migration and data synchronization differ in applicable scenarios, functionality, and billing. For more information about the differences between data migration and data synchronization, see the "What are the differences between data migration and data synchronization?" section of the What are the differences between data migration and data synchronization? topic.
Data integrationData integration is an advanced feature on top of data migration. You can configure a scheduling policy to migrate schemas and historical data from a source database to a destination database on a regular basis. The data integration feature allows you to flexibly build a data warehouse, such as an offline data warehouse. Data integration mode
Change tracking

You can use DTS to track incremental data from self-managed MySQL databases, ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL instances, PolarDB for MySQL clusters, PolarDB-X instances, and self-managed Oracle databases in real time. Then, you can consume the tracked data as needed. This feature is suitable for the following scenarios: cache updates, business decoupling and asynchronous data processing, real-time data synchronization between heterogeneous databases, and real-time data synchronization that involves extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations.

Change tracking mode
ETLYou can use DTS to extract, transform, process, and load streaming data. This feature provides more options for real-time data processing and computing and helps enterprises accelerate digital transformation. What is ETL?
Data verificationYou can use DTS to enable the data verification feature for a data migration or synchronization task. The data verification feature helps you detect inconsistent data between the source and destination databases at the earliest opportunity. Enable data verification

Supported databases

DTS supports a variety of data sources. For more information, see Supported sources and targets.

Management methods

You can use the following methods to create and configure DTS tasks and perform task O&M:

  • DTS console: a web service page used to efficiently manage DTS tasks.
  • API: provides API operations that you can call to perform all operations that are available in the DTS console.
  • SDK: provides SDKs for a variety of programming languages to perform all operations that are available in the DTS console.

Pricing

For more information, see Billing overview.

Related Alibaba Cloud services

  • Elastic Compute Service (ECS): Self-managed databases hosted on ECS instances can serve as the data sources or destinations for data migration, data synchronization, and change tracking tasks.
  • ApsaraDB RDS: ApsaraDB RDS is a stable, reliable, and scalable online database service. ApsaraDB RDS provides a variety of solutions for disaster recovery, backup, restoration, and migration to facilitate database O&M.
  • PolarDB: PolarDB is a next-generation relational database service that is developed by Alibaba Cloud. PolarDB is compatible with the MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle database engines. PolarDB provides superior performance in storage and computing to meet the requirements of enterprises. Each PolarDB cluster provides a storage capacity of up to 100 TB and supports up to 16 nodes.
  • PolarDB-X: PolarDB-X is a cloud-based distributed database service that is designed to handle the bottlenecks of standalone databases. PolarDB-X is developed by Alibaba Cloud. PolarDB-X is highly compatible with MySQL protocols and syntax and supports automatic sharding, online smooth scaling, elastic scaling, and read/write splitting. PolarDB-X provides O&M capabilities throughout the lifecycle of databases.
  • ApsaraDB for Redis: ApsaraDB for Redis is an online key-value storage database service that provides high performance and is compatible with open source Redis protocols.
  • ApsaraDB for MongoDB: ApsaraDB for MongoDB is a MongoDB-compatible database service that is developed based on the Apsara distributed operating system and a high-reliability storage engine. ApsaraDB for MongoDB uses a multi-node architecture to ensure high availability, and supports elastic scaling, disaster recovery, backup and restoration, and performance optimization.