You can safely and efficiently migrate an on-premises TimeXtender application server and database platform to Azure. By following our guide here, the TimeXtender application and services will be installed on a cloud-based Virtual Machine. The project repository and target SQL databases will be housed in an Azure PaaS database. For performance reasons, it is highly recommended your cloud databases are deployed in the same region as the cloud-based application server.
In addition, you can use Azure Marketplace templates for deploying TimeXtender and Azure Data Services preconfigured for TimeXtender. These plans include the TimeXtender Application Server deployed in a Virtual Machine on Azure that has been pre-configured to best support TimeXtender and connections to Azure Data Services.
To move from one server to the other, use Microsoft Azure Migrate to migrate databases, schemas of databases, data and users, server roles, and SQL Server and Windows Logins. This is the best way to help you upgrade to your modern data platform because it is designed to enable seamless migrations to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime. It will also detect any compatibility issues that can impact database functionality.
When migrating the TimeXtender application server and services, one of the most important pieces is to migrate the project repository database that contains all of metadata for your projects.
There are several Azure Data Services options that can be deployed with TimeXtender. Let’s take a look at a few.
Add an Azure SQL Single Database
Azure SQL Single Database is a fully managed, database-as-a-service in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This service is always running the latest SQL Engine, never requires patches or updating and can be deployed in minutes. When configured using the "Serverless" Compute Tier, the database can even scale and pause automatically based on workload. It is an ideal solution for most cloud-based data warehouses utilizing fewer than billion row tables and requiring less than several terabytes of storage.
Azure SQL Database does not support cross-database queries, so the typical architecture of having separate Staging and Data Warehouse databases is not ideal. In this case, we can configure TimeXtender to connect to the same database for both layers and separate the tables logically by using separate schemas. Visit here for more information.
Add an Azure Synapse SQL Pool (SQL Data Warehouse)
Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service enabling insights across relational and non-relational big-data. At its core is the SQL Pool (Previously Azure SQL Data Warehouse), a massively parallel processing database.
TimeXtender began supporting Azure Synapse as a target database in version 19.11.2. This functionality enables the use of Azure Synapse Analytics as a target Data Warehouse or Staging Database. When also connected to Azure Data Lake via the ODX Server, users can simply drag and drop data from Data Lake to a Synapse SQL Pool. Visit here for more information.
Add an Azure Data Lake Storage
This guide will cover how to create and add Azure Data Lake storage for the ODX in TimeXtender. If you are creating a TimeXtender environment from scratch, we highly recommend using one of the supported configuration options for deploying TimeXtender in Azure.
If you have already deployed one of the Azure Marketplace templates with Azure Data Lake then you already have all of the necessary data lake resources and can proceed to register an application.
If you have already deployed TimeXtender in Azure, but have not yet configured an Azure Data Lake storage account, you can use refer to the guide mentioned above to add a Data Lake storage option to start.
Let us know how you do or if you have any questions.
Happy migration.