George Woods

Sr. Cloud Solution Architect - Corporate Team at Microsoft



Migrate SQL Server Database to Azure SQL Database using Data Migration Assistant – part 1

29 Aug 2018

We will be using the Data Migration Assistant to assess and then migrate an on-prem SQL Server 2012 SP2 database to an Azure SQL Database

Part 1: Download and install Data Migration Assistant

To install DMA, download the latest version of the tool from the Microsoft Download Center, and then run the DataMigrationAssistant.msi file.

Click next

Accept the license agreement

Click install

Wait for the install to complete

Check the box beside Launch Microsoft Data Migration Assistant and click Finish

Part 2: Open Data Migration Assistant and create assessment

We will now start with assessing our on-prem SQL Server

  1. Click the +New icon and select Assessment project type
  2. Give your assessment a name
  3. We will leave the Source server type and Target server type as is.
  4. Click create

I left the defaults checked and clicked next

Fill in the server name and authentication type. *Notice that the credentials used to connect must be a member of the sysadmin role

Click connect

Choose the sources and click add. I am only interested in the CentralDB database at this time

If you are satisfied with the sources that you have added, click Start Assessment

Obviously, the assessment run time depends on how many and what size of the sources

When the assessment completes

You can see the results on the screen or you can export the report as a json or csv file.

In this example, you can see that there are 3 Unsupported features and 1 Partially supported feature.

With each issue the details section will give the impact. Recommendation and more info

One last screenshot to show the assessment options

You can open, restart or delete an assessment

In part 3, we will look at Migrating a SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database.