Challenges in migrating on-prem database to Azure Database/managed instance

Question

Hi All, The common challenge we come across migrating from on-prem database to Azure database/managed instance is schema compatibility and schema conversion., it might includes data type compatibility etc. I would be thankful if you point out to other key considerations and factors that might be potential challenges in the migration. I went through below documentation which didn't clarify enough.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/sql-data-sync-sql-server-configure
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/dms/known-issues-troubleshooting-dms

Thanks a lot for your help.

Answer 1

The first thing you should do is verify the log rate of your SQL Server instance is too high to consider a migration to an Azure Managed Instance. Nobody does this test and some get surprises once all is migrated. Compare the log rate of your SQL Server instance with the log rate limits for Azure Managed Instance using the procedure outlined in this article.

In addition, perform an assessment using Data Migration Assistant this tool may uncover more challenges for your migration project.

Here you will find more tools to perform assessments and identify blocking points. If you use Data Migration Service (DMS) you will need to open quite some ports to be able to use it, that may be a challenge. maybe a network admin is needed to help on that. DMS is practically the the way to migrate a database in near real-time.