The scary part of upgrading SQL Server is finding out you have a problem AFTER the fact. In this episode, Mariano Kovo joins us to discuss the Data Migration Assistant tool from Microsoft. While the name can be a bit misleading, (What? Microsoft have confusing names—that’s a first), the major benefit to the tool is the assessment feature to alert you of potential issues when you upgrade. Issues are broken into three major categories:
- Breaking Changes
- Behavior Changes
- Deprecated Changes
While each change should be reviewed, many times we allow deprecated features to remain unresolved as they are still supported in SQL Server; however, we certainly want to put those on the backlog because one day Microsoft will finally pull the plug and we want to be ahead of the curve.

Our Guest
Mariano Kovo
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“[Data Migration Assistant] will tell you if you are using any instance feature that is not compatible with the destination target that you choose.”
Mariano Kovo
3 Takeaways
- Data Migration Assistant (DMA) replaces the Database Upgrade Advisor.
- DMA can create new objects in Azure SQL Database environments, but is not our preferred method to migrate databases.
- DMA can only inspect objects in the database—it won’t check ad hoc code inside the application unless you provide a trace file to review.
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