I've downloaded and installed the data migration assistant application, and I'm going to create a new assessment project by clicking on the plus button. The project type is assessment, and I'll give it the name of database assessment. I'll leave the assessment type as database engine. The other option is integration services. The source type is SQL Server, and I'm targeting Azure SQL database as the migration destination. Clicking the create button will start the assessment wizard. This first page gives me the option of selecting the compatibility features I want to check. We'll stick with the default of checking everything, and I'll click next. The source server is on the same computer I've installed the data migration assistant, but it can be anywhere within your on-premise network. I'll use SQL Server authentication to log in with the SA user. Once connected, I'll select three databases of varying ages and compatibility levels. Well, two 2008 R2 old ones and one SQL Server 2019 new database. Next, I'll start the assessment.

Once the assessment has finished, we are first presented with the SQL Server feature parity report, and it will come as no surprise that Azure SQL does not support many of the features available in SQL Server 2019. I'm more interested in the compatibility issues when moving my databases from on-premise to Azure. Looking at AGDDW, a 2008 R2 database, we are alerted to the use of old and deprecated data types. More importantly, the assessment has highlighted cross-database references that are not supported in Azure SQL in this form. For this database to be migrated, I would need to add additional tables or use Azure elastic query to interrogate external data sources. LE_CRM also suffers from deprecated data types and cross-database joins as well as unqualified joins and outmoded ways of dealing with XML.

With the assessment complete, I can now upload the report to Azure. Despite this generic authentication error, I can select my subscription and the migration project I've set up in the portal. Clicking upload has successfully uploaded the assessment. Switching over to the portal, I can see the database assessment panel is now populated with assessed instances, databases, and databases ready to migrate. I'm not sure why all the instance and database numbers are zero. Maybe it is related to that login error when I was authenticating from the data migration assistant, but I can click on the zero and drill down into the assessment report. Having a look at the databases, we can see that SalesData and AGDDW are both ready for Azure SQL, with the proviso that I deal with the cross-database queries. LE_CRM is not ready for Azure SQL, but naturally enough, all databases can be migrated to SQL Server running on a virtual machine.

Drilling down into databases ready for Azure SQL DB, we see the two migration-ready databases, and all databases, as we saw, are ready for Azure SQL VM.