Migration

Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server database migrations with zero data loss and zero downtime

August 15, 2018 by

The growing importance and complexity of data migration, in an era of exploding data volumes and ever-changing business requirements, means that old approaches will no longer get the job done. We are in a world where everything needs to run instantly. Every Database Administrator or Developer would have definitely heard about database migrations with zero downtime and with zero data loss.

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Jefferson Elias

A concrete example of migration between an Oracle Database and SQL Server using Microsoft Data Migration Assistant

April 12, 2018 by

Introduction

Intended audience

This document is intended for application developers and database administrators who plan to migrate an Oracle Database to Microsoft SQL Server.

Context

In the previous article, we saw how to install and prepare to migrate one or more Oracle Schema(s) and their objects to SQL Server. Now it’s time to go through the migration process…

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Minette Steynberg

The end is nigh! (For SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2)

April 4, 2018 by

Introduction

As with everything else, all good things must come to an end. After hanging around for a good decade SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 has started the countdown to its End of Life.

D-day for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 is set to the 19th of July 2019. Which is approximately a year from now, give or take a couple of months.

If you are still running SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2, now is definitely the time to upgrade. In this article; I am going to tell you why you would want to upgrade to a newer version of SQL Server (2016 or 2017) or Azure SQL Database. I will also discuss some of the tools that you might use to make the upgrade as painless as possible.

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Jefferson Elias

Migrating an Oracle Database to SQL Server with Microsoft Data Migration Assistant – Installation Process and Short Overview

March 27, 2018 by

Intended audience

This document is intended for application developers and database administrators who plan to migrate an Oracle Database to Microsoft SQL Server.

Context

Nowadays, most IT professionals are aware that Oracle Database is a very good database solution, but it’s not inexpensive, to say the least. If you want to partition a table in Oracle, it’s an option that you must pay for, which is the same for advanced security options like Database Encryption or Dynamic Data Masking. In contrast, SQL Server comes with these options out of the box when you use the Enterprise Edition.

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Sifiso W. Ndlovu

How to migrate SQL Server 2017 Master Data Services Models into another server

March 23, 2018 by

Often as consultants, we don’t get to work onsite alongside our clients instead we are given copies of clients’ production environment and work on proposed solutions back at our offices. Once development has been completed, we then deploy and integrate our solution back to the client’s production environment. I’ve recently had to adopt a similar offsite development approach whilst working on a project that included development and configuration of master data services. In this article, I will demonstrate how a SQL Server 2017 Master Data Services (MDS) model can be exported from one environment (i.e. MDS Dev) and deployed into another environment (i.e. MDS Prod).

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Craig Porteous

Migrating SSRS content with PowerShell

January 29, 2018 by

With a distinct lack of up-to-date, fully featured or built-in options to get Reporting Services content cleanly from A to B, it can often be a challenging task maintaining proper Development and QA environments or even moving reports from a SharePoint integrated installation to a native mode one, and vice versa.

I want to explore the two most efficient methods of bulk-migrating Reporting Services content & also explore other options I’ve used over the years and those that have come and gone.

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Marko Radakovic

How to move SQL database files (MDF and LDF) to another location

January 22, 2018 by

How often you got to the point that for any reason you don’t have enough space on the specific drive to host a database? In case of database development or other tasks outside the production environment, this should not be a problem as a database can be eventually re-created, restored from a backup and set to be hosted on another location. By default, SQL Server stores database files in its installation folder, specifically in the Data folder:

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server DB Migration – Cloning a database to another collation

September 19, 2017 by

Database migration is a vital task in any environment, complex or otherwise. Seamless migrations are the goal but the efforts required to ensure it are tremendous.

Backing up and restoring the database is surely a preferred and a robust approach, but does it work well in all situations? How do we plan this when the source and the destination databases need different configurations? How do we make such a migration seamless?

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Daniel Calbimonte

How to migrate MySQL tables to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) and SSIS

April 25, 2017 by

Introduction

In this article, we will demonstrate how to migrate MySQL tables to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) and SSIS. We will give a brief introduction to MySQL and create a table. If you do not have any experience in MySQL, this tutorial will teach you your first steps. After that, we will migrate the created table and existing tables. We will also mention common problems when we migrate tables.

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Kaloyan Kosev

How to work with filegroups in SQL Server and migrate data between them

March 8, 2017 by

As you may already have figured out, the default settings in SQL Server are not always the best. Such is the case when you are working with new user databases; usually you get a single data (*.mdf) and transaction log (*.ldf) file. The data file resides within the PRIMARY file group; the only one we have so far, and it will store all of our databases objects, system objects, user tables, user stored procedures and all other objects. In some cases this default configuration may be good enough for you, but let us cover why would you prefer a different configuration in your production environment.

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Microsoft SQL Server Non-Contained Object Migration Deployment Procedure using Powershell

January 12, 2017 by

As DBAs, we all face a lot of challenges while performing the migration of SQL Server databases from one server to another or even the whole servers at some times. The Database Migration process is not always a simple Backup and Restore process so we might need a huge amount of effort if we have to migrate objects which are not included in the native backups for a specified database, these objects are called Non-Contained Objects.

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Vitor Montalvão

Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v7.1 for Oracle

December 12, 2016 by

Introduction

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) is a free supported tool from Microsoft that simplifies and automates database migration processes (assessment analysis, necessary conversions, data migration and tests) from Microsoft Access, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase and DB2 to SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL Server vNext (at the time I’m writing this article, SQL Server vNext stills in CTP1 version, so being a technical preview version it should not be used for production migrations).

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Kaloyan Kosev

How to migrate an on premise SQL Server database to Azure

September 27, 2016 by

Lately, database administrators often hear the question “have you tried Azure?“ or “can we use Azure for some of our databases?“. For me it was hard to answer these questions at first, but after a while I got to know what is really important behind these situations. In fact, what really matters is assessing the current environment, calculating the most suitable pricing tier and preparing a smooth migration.

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Miroslav Dimitrov

SQL Server stretch databases – Moving your “cold” data to the Cloud

August 18, 2016 by

Tons of new and exciting features have been introduced with the release of the latest SQL Server 2016. It simply is faster, better and more reliable! 🙂 As with the last several releases, there are again a lot of improvements with regards to the integration between on-premises databases and databases sitting into the Cloud. The ultimate goal is to have as convenient and easy as possible migration of the data in both directions. Today’s focus will be one of those features: Stretched Databases. Fasten your seatbelts and discover what is beneath this term!

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to copy tables from one database to another in SQL Server

April 29, 2016 by

In some cases, as a DBA, you are requested to copy the schema and the content of specific tables from a database to another one in the same instance or in a different SQL instance, such as copying specific tables from a production database to a DEV one for testing or troubleshooting purposes.

SQL Server offers a lot of methods that can be used to perform table’s data and schema copy process. In order to go through each one of these methods, we will consider the below scenario:

  • The hosting SQL Server: localhost.
  • Both databases hosted in the same SQL Server 2017 instance
  • The source database: AdventureWorks2018
  • The destination database: SQLShackDemo
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