SAP-C02 Practice Question 59: SQL Server Licence Exit
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 6 · question 9 of 10
An order management platform runs on Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition in a leased data centre. The lease ends in nine months. Commercial database licensing is the single largest line in the platform's budget, and the CTO has mandated a move to an open-source engine.
The application is a decade-old .NET codebase with roughly 600 Transact-SQL stored procedures, and it connects using SQL Server client drivers that speak the Tabular Data Stream protocol. The two developers who understand the data access layer have both left. A full rewrite of the stored procedures into PL/pgSQL has been costed at eighteen months, which does not fit the lease deadline, and the company wants a managed database rather than servers it patches.
Which migration approach best fits these constraints?
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Answer:
Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL extends an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster with the ability to accept connections from SQL Server clients. AWS states that with Babelfish, applications originally built for SQL Server can work directly with Aurora PostgreSQL with few code changes compared to a traditional migration and without changing database drivers; the cluster gains an additional endpoint that understands the SQL Server wire-level protocol and commonly used SQL Server statements, and TDS clients connect natively on port 1433. That is what lets a .NET codebase whose authors have left keep its drivers and its T-SQL while the engine underneath becomes open source, removing the commercial licence cost inside the nine-month window. DMS handles the data movement, and Aurora is managed, so nobody patches a database server. The team should still budget testing time: Babelfish runs T-SQL with some documented differences and limitations, so the stored procedures need a compatibility pass rather than a rewrite.
Option A keeps paying for the licences the CTO mandated removing, and it moves the deadline rather than meeting it.
Option B solves the data centre exit and the operational burden but not the commercial one; RDS for SQL Server still runs licensed Microsoft software, so the largest line in the budget survives.
Option C reaches the same destination by the route the company already priced at eighteen months. It is the correct long-term answer for a team that wants native PostgreSQL, but it misses the lease deadline, which is the binding constraint here.
Reference: Using Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL