SQL Server Migration Limitations

Some major limitations due to which partial data loss or structural disparity can happen are listed below.

  • The SQL Server endpoint does not support the use of sparse tables.
  • Temporal tables are not supported.
  • Partition Switching is not supported.
  • Column-level encryption is not supported.
  • Column descriptions (remarks) are not migrated.
  • Replicating data from indexed views isn't supported.
  • Collection objects (ex: xml collections) aren’t migrated.
  • Fields with the following data types aren’t supported:
    • CURSOR
    • SQL_VARIANT
    • TABLE (user-defined)
  • Fields with the following data types are deprecated and are partially supported for backward compatibility reasons. (Suggested to avoid using these data types)
    • NTEXT
    • IMAGE
    • TEXT
  • For tables having the below mentioned data types and no primary key, only staging migration can be done, cdc (live-migration) is not possible.
    • NTEXT
    • IMAGE
    • TEXT
    • XML
    • All MAX data types (like varchar(max), varbinary (max) etc.)
  • Presence of schema with the name “cdc” in the source DB will be ignored and not migrated.
  • Identities on NUMERIC(p, 0)  columns are only supported for p <= 18.
    • If p > 18, the pre-migration validation would fail, and the migration task cannot move further.
    • For p <= 18, they are converted to BigInt data types.
  • Fields with the following data-types are migrated with different data-type on target:

    Source Field Data Type

    Target Field Data Type

    DATETIMEOFFSET

    WSTRING

General references

  • Limitations for source DB can be found here.
  • Limitations for target DB can be found here.
  • Troubleshooting issues while migrating SQL Server purely with DMS can be found here.
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