Press "Enter" to skip to content

Migrating Databases between SQL Managed Instances

Etienne Lopes performs a migration:

In this post I’m going to show a very simple way to migrate a database between two SQL Server managed Instances in Azure. I’m not a big fan of bacpac files (although I work with it when necessary) so I’ll use a different approach here. Besides, when creating a bacpac file using SSMS there are some schema validations that occur at the beginning that will abort the bacpac generation for example if the database holds three-part names inside stored procedures. While not supported in SQL Azure DB it is supported in SQL Managed Instances (as are cross-database queries), and it can be quite frustrating to experience this show stopper when using bacpac’s to migrate or copy databases between Managed Instances.

Click through for the demo. And yeah, I’ve run into limiting factors with bacpacs, such as having certificates for encrypting data (even if you back those up separately).