Data migration is the process of securely migrating data from your on-premises SQL Server instance to your Business Central online tenant. The process uses the Azure Data Factory (ADF) to migrate the data between databases directly, meaning it does not look at any permissions within the applications you are transferring data between, only SQL permissions.
In order for the data migration to take place, you must successfully complete the Cloud Migration Setup assisted setup wizard in your Business Central online tenant. Once the wizard is complete and data migration is activated, an initial data migration will happen at the scheduled time. Alternatively, you can trigger the data migration process manually.
Data is migrated between the two systems on a per-table basis, and success and failures are tracked for each table. If a table fails to migrate, the error will be captured, and the migration moves on to the next table until completed. Tables will fail to migrate if they cannot be found, or if the schema does not match between the cloud and the on-premises tables.
The initial data migration time can vary depending factors such as the amount of data to migrate, your SQL Server configuration, and your connection speeds. The initial migration will take the longest amount of time to complete because all data is migrating. After the initial migration, only changes in data will be migrated so they should run more quickly. You do not need to run the migration process more than once if you don't want to, but if you are running the migration while users are still using the on-premises system you will need to run at least one more migration in order to ensure all data was moved to the cloud before you start transacting in the cloud tenant.
