Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4-3.
DAC execution results
This process is quite fast. The AWMini database contains 10 tables with a total of about 200,000 records, and on
my system migrating it took less than a minute. Your results may vary (my apologies for sounding like a commercial)
depending on your Internet connection, but even larger databases, such as the full AdventureWorks database, didn't
take much longer.
This option is a no-stop migration for deploying your SQL Server database to SQL Azure. This means that once
you click Finish, the deployment begins. Yet, the BACPAC file specified in the Temporary File Name in Figure
4-2
will
still exist once the migration completes. Depending on the size of the database, the DAC file (
.bacpac
) could be quite
large. Even for the AWMini database the file size was 5.5 MB. The great thing is that if you have a program that can
open a large XML file (and enough memory), you can look to see the structure of the BACPAC.
The BACPAC file at this point can be archived, deleted, or used for other import services. In this simple example,
the BACPAC was stored locally. However, best practices state that if you will be importing the database to multiple
servers or multiple times, you'll want to store the BACPAC in Windows Azure storage.
