Just recently we had to decommission a RDS instance where we had “upsized” an Access database into a Microsoft SQL Server hosted on Amazon’s cloud.
This decommissioning was merely a cost-saving step to eliminate resources that were used transitionally on one of our Access-application-to-full-web-app conversion projects. However, we did want to preserve a copy of the database that we could reference locally on development machines in the future.
Overall, this procedure was surprisingly complicated, although once the right components were configured in Amazon’s ecosystem, the process went smoothly.
The Amazon document Importing and Exporting SQL Server Databases was our basic guide for this process.
