Cross Subscription Copying of Databases on Windows Azure SQL Database

Question

We are about to split our testing and production instances in Windows Azure into two separate subscriptions. Currently we have 3 Windows Azure SQL Database instances that r

Answer 1

I understand that this is quite old question and still wanted to add yet another option.

If you want to have this task automated, you do not want to do it manually (Export-Import), you want to copy the database to the existing server (and not create a new temporary one that will be moved across subscriptions) and you do not want to have same credentials on source and target servers because of security considerations, you can use ARM.

There is a option to create database as copy ("createMode": "Copy",) and it will make it across subscriptions! Simple example:

{
  "$schema": "http://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2014-04-01-preview/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "parameters": {
  },
  "resources": [
    {
      "apiVersion": "2014-04-01-preview",
      "location": "australiaeast",
      "name": "{DESTINATION-SERVER-NAME}/{DESTINATION-DATABASE-NAME}",
      "properties": {
        "createMode": "Copy",
        "sourceDatabaseId": "/subscriptions/{SOURCE-SUBSCRIPTION-ID}/resourceGroups/{SOURCE-RESOURCE-GROUP-NAME}/providers/Microsoft.Sql/servers/{SOURCE-SERVER-NAME}/databases/{SOURCE-DATABASE-NAME}",
        "requestedServiceObjectiveName": "S2"
      },
      "type": "Microsoft.Sql/servers/databases"
    }
  ]
}  

Two things to note - the service principal that will be executing this deployment will need to be have a contributor access on source and the sourceDatabaseId is a full resource id.

If you do it from Azure DevOps using "Azure resource group deployment" task - it will create a SP for subscription. You will need give Contributor access to it. SP can be found in Project Settings -> Service Connections.