Moving to the cloud offers many new opportunities for how you store and handle your data. One challenge we ran into was how to migrate a large Sitecore web db into a PAAS sql azure db.

There are quite a few tools for doing this, even SQL management studio can help. The problem we faced was the source db had several filegroups setup, SQL Azure doesn’t support this.

To get around it we first created the DB through the portal, then scripted in the db structure – follow the steps in this link: http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2010/06/04/sql-server-generate-database-script-for-sql-azure/

The second step was then the data. We used the Azure MW tool (https://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/) . When selecting what to migrate, select ‘data only’. This can take a while to run, several hours in our case, but at least got the data upto the cloud.