What is Azure Data migration?

Azure Data Migration helps you simplify, guide and automate your database migration to Azure. Easily migrate your data, schema and objects from multiple sources to the cloud at scale. Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) provides fully managed assistance for anyone migrating on-premises databases to Azure database offerings. You can use DMS to migrate any type of database, data type, and migration type. You can also automate the process with PowerShell commandlets. The service supports homogeneous (SQL Server to SQL Server) and heterogeneous (Oracle to SQL Server) migrations. It enables you to migrate to SQL Database, SQL Server on virtual machines, Cosmos DB, Azure DB for MySQL, or Azure DB for PostgreSQL.

There are multiple tools which help you manage data in an Azure storage account. These include Azure Storage Explorer which has an easy to use graphical user interface to command line tools such as AZCopy, Azure Powershell, and the Azure CLI.

1 – Azure Storage Explorer

Azure Storage Explorer allows you to easily manage your Azure storage accounts via an installed client-side application which runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Migrating data with Azure Storage Explorer is as simple as copy and pasting files into a standard operating system file system manager. Naturally, the larger the size of the data and the speed of the network will impact how long it will take to copy data from the source location to your Azure storage account subscription.

Command Line Tools for migrating unstructured data

2 – AzCopy

AzCopy is a command line utility built specifically to aid users in copying data from external sources to Azure storage. Also, AzCopy also lets you copy data from one Azure storage account to another and even copy data across subscriptions.

This command line utility, which in essence is the stripped-down copy functionality from Azure Storage Explorer, is available for both Microsoft and Linux platforms. To use this utility, you will need some familiarity with command line syntax which makes it a little less simple to use than Azure Storage Explorer. However, as it is a command line interface, it can be installed on systems which do not have a graphical user interface such as Windows Core, Windows Nano, and Linux servers.

3 – Azure PowerShell

PowerShell is a command line scripting language built by Microsoft which gives you the ability to interact with Microsoft technologies via a task-based interactive shell. Azure PowerShell is a set of PowerShell cmdlets created to communicate with Azure Resource Manager letting you manage Azure services via the command line.

Azure PowerShell, like Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy, allows you to manage the transfer of data to, from, and within Azure storage accounts. With Azure PowerShell, you can script an entire data migration by creating a storage account for copying and verifying the data.

I hope this information will be helpful!

Mark Wilson