We are excited to announce that transactional replication to Azure SQL Database is now generally available (GA). This feature allows you to migrate your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Databases with minimal downtime.
You can configure your on-premises SQL Server databases that you wish to migrate as publisher and configure your Azure SQL Database as push subscriber to the SQL Server instance. The transactional replication distributor synchronizes data from the publisher to the subscriber. All changes to your data and schema will show up in your Azure SQL Database. Once the synchronization is completed, and you are ready to migrate, change the connection string of your applications to point them to your Azure SQL Database.
You can also use transactional replication to migrate a subset of your source database. The publication that you replicate to Azure SQL Database can be limited to a subset of the tables in the database being replicated. For each table being replicated, you can limit the data to a subset of the rows and/or a subset of the columns.
Please see SQL Server database migration to SQL Database in the cloud for more details.
Transactional replication can also be used to synchronize your data from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Databases in one direction. To synchronize data in bi-direction or from Azure SQL Database, see following the document for more options: Sync data across multiple cloud and on-premises databases with SQL Data Sync.
