Today, we are very excited to announce general availability of offline migrations and public preview availability of online migrations to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance in the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS).

The GA release significantly enriches this Database migration scenario - you can use Azure DMS to migrate SQL Server databases running on-premises or in virtual machines to an Azure Sql Database Managed Instance with minimal downtime, enabling a seamless application switch to Azure without impacting your business.

DMS is a one-stop shop for migrating data from different database engines to Azure with built-in resiliency and robustness. With online migrations, businesses can migrate their databases to Azure while the databases continue to be operational. As a result, migrations can be completed with minimal downtime for critical applications, limiting the impact to service level availability and inconvenience to end customers.

While offline migrations are already available in 25 Azure regions, online migrations of SQL Server on-premises/on IaaS workloads to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance are available for customers using migration projects hosted in the following regions:

• East US2
• Central US
• West Europe

We will be extending online migration to the other 22 regions by mid-October, 2018.

Setting up an online migration in DMS is very simple. DMS online migration support the existing backup files.  DMS first restores the full database backup and continuously restores the transaction log backups provided onto the target Azure SQL Database Managed Instance until the customer initiates the cutover migration at a convenient time.

Limitations and known issues

Known issues and limitations associated with online migrations are below.

·       Support for online migrations of TDE enabled databases coming soon, meanwhile you can use offline migration project in Azure Database Migration Service for migrating TDE enabled databases.

·       DMS currently will not support online migrations when the source database backups are taken to multiple backup stripes.

In addition, we are also releasing the scenarios below.

Public preview

DMS now provides public preview support for the following online migration scenarios:

• PostgreSQL to Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Private preview

The following migration scenarios are now available in private preview:

• Online migrations from Oracle to:
  • Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
  • SQL Server on Azure VM
• Offline migrations from MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB

If you are interested in participating in one or more of our private preview programs, please be sure to submit a nomination via the DMS Preview website.

Additional resources

Please refer to the resources below for online migrations.

• Latest updates to Open Source Database Services for Azure – Ignite 2018
• Tutorial: Migrating from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database online migration
• Tutorial: Migrating from MySQL to Azure Database for MySQL online migration
• How to monitor an online migration
• Azure Database Migration Service pricing
• Online migration limitations and known issues
• Assess your on-premises SQL Server databases using DMA 
• Use Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA) to and evaluate the target Azure SQL Database performance

Call to action

Sign in to the Azure portal and set up an instance of DMS for free. We are constantly adding new database source/target pairs to DMS. Stay up-to-date on #AzureDMS news and follow us on Twitter (@Data_Migrations). Join the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) Yammer group, and give us feedback via User Voice or email by contacting us at [email protected].  Also be sure to check out the Azure Database Migration Guide for information about how to migrate other source/target pairs. Thank you!

Raj Pochiraju
Principal Program Manager
Azure Data Engineering