Regularly Transfer SQL Server to Azure SQL

Question

I'm completely stymied. Let me describe my situation.

We're a relatively small company and the vast majority of our operational data is contained in a vendor database. Our vendor offers a Data Warehousing service. They've taken all of our data and applied some OLAP-ish modeling to it. Each day, they place either a .bak or a .diff file (.bak once a week, .diff every other day) in a FTP endpoint that we pay to access. Currently, we use a PowerShell script to download this data to a server that we've got sitting at a local server farm, where we then use SQL Server to "rehydrate it" by restoring from it.

That's all fine and good, but we really want to move as many of our workloads into the cloud as possible (we use Azure). As far as I can tell, SQL Managed Instances are the only way we can restore from a .bak file in the cloud. This is waaaay more expensive than we need, and we really don't need the managed instance platform at all except to restore from this file.

Basically, everything about this current process is diametrically opposed to us moving it to the cloud, unless we want to pay even more than we are to rent out this server farm.

I'm trying to lobby them for a different method of getting their data, but I'm having trouble coming up with a method to propose. We need to, every day, transfer a ~40gb database from SQL Server (at our vendor) to Azure SQL (in our cloud). What's the least-intrusive way we could do this?

Answer 1

We are glad that you choose the Azure SQL on Azure VM as the solution. Thanks for the suggestions of Alex and Davaid too:

• I've actually seen all of those resources already. The biggest obstacle here is that the entire process has to be automated end-to-end, which makes bacpac restores more difficult (they'd have to write some sort of .NET app to back up to bacpac). I think SQL on Azure VM is the only real option, so I may have to look at cost for that.

If others face the same scenario, we could reference this. This also can be beneficial to other community members.