Chapter 11: The Real Migration Experience

This is the final chapter of the book. Let's put the technical details, methods, and setups aside and just talk about the real usage of the Cloud Migration tool. I'm proud that I was one of the first users of this tool to implement it in a real project. I want to tell you my story. I hope that you will find it interesting and it will inspire you to not be afraid of new technologies, even if they seem quite raw.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:  

• Cloud Migration – early beginnings and evolution
• Issues in the course of implementation

Cloud Migration – early beginnings and evolution

The first time I heard about Cloud Migration was after the Business Central 2018 October release. It was referred to by the name Intelligent Edge. As I understood from different sources, the tool allowed you to replicate your data from NAV 2018, Business Central on-premises, and Dynamics GP to Business Central SaaS, but the table schema strictly had to be the same. Migration failed if the tables had even one different field. This was not very interesting to me, because each project I worked on had some customizations, which made such migrations impossible. And so I forgot about it (for several months at least).

Reference

You can see the old presentation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/october18/dynamics365-business-central/dynamics-intelligent-edge.

Before the Business Central 2019 April release was presented, Microsoft said that Intelligent Edge had been upgraded and the strict...

Issues in the course of implementation

I created a copy of the customer's production database and started replication.

First issue

The first issue I met was that on-premises databases were in Azure SQL. From the migration admin's point of view, it looked perfect. You don't need to install Integration Runtime and setup runs faster. We were happy until the migration finished and we opened the migrated company in the cloud. The source database had a Cyrillic collation and the destination database had Latin. All Cyrillic text transformed into ??? characters, and after communicating with different people, I realized that there is no way to migrate different collations this way. We had to migrate to the on-premises SQL Server first. I know that this problem still exists because I've heard the same problem raised by colleagues at conferences.

After the migration to SQL Server on-premises, replication finished successfully and no more issues occurred. We decided...

Summary

To conclude, I can say that the project was definitely worth it. We dived deep into a new technology, which worked as expected, despite issues that occurred during the exploitation. The customer got exactly what they wanted and saved money. We got a huge amount of experience in using Business Central without writing a single line of code.

I hope that this story inspired you to use non-standard ways of task resolution. Business Central developers must not be limited to using only Business Central. They must know how to use as many Microsoft products as they can. Azure, Dataverse, Cloud Migration, Power BI – they all help you to complete some tasks much faster than you would be able to by writing a hundred lines of AL code.

In this book, I tried to collect everything that a Business Central specialist needs for the administration or migration of an environment to the cloud. I will be happy if someday I see this book on somebody's table. Thanks for having me...

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