How to do replication in Azure SQL PaaS

Question

In our application we have external sources to process data and insert the data into the database, and the same database using for the application. Due to this the database is overloaded.

To avoid this,we were using 2 servers, one is to process data and other is to used in application. After processing in first server we are moving data to other server by replication process.

Now we want to move this whole setup to Azure SQL PaaS. As per now Replication is not possible in Azure PaaS.

Please help us to resolve this.

Answer 1

With SQL 2016 this will be possible:

https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/blog/transactional-replication-to-azure-sql-db/

One scenario which might work is run production on a SQL 2014, replicate to SQL 2016 CTP, and replicate that to SQL Azure

Answer 2

If your application includes updates or inserts then you need an active-active configuration, which can be accomplished using transactional replication. At the moment SQL database only supports the one-way replication from an on premise SQL server (or SQL server in VM) to SQL database. The link above provides the details of how to use one-way replication. If you want to move the whole setup to Azure I would recommend using a SQL server in VM for inserts from external sources and SQL database for the application. See here for details of migrating from on premise to SQL in VM.

If your application operates in mostly read-only mode you can consider Active geo-replication . It supports the single-master configuration where all the updates are made on the primary. This would allow you to use SQL Database for both replicas. You can have both the primary and the secondary in the same region or in two different regions. The use of two regions would provide the ultimate isolation and would allow you to use the secondary for disaster recovery in addition to load balancing. The described setup requires using the Premium service tier. Check this article for details of SQL database service tiers.

Note, the active geo-replication overview article is being updated with more information so I recommend checking it a couple of days.