I need to move all the data of a production database to its staging version. These 2 databases are Azure SQL Databases from 2 different resource groups.

I have read some guides on how to achieve this exporting and importing .bacpac files, but this approach doesn't allow to import into an existing database.

I'm looking for a way for migrating the data without creating a new database, but targeting the already existing one.

CodePudding user response：

Azure SQL Database does not have a backup and restore (WITH REPLACE option) as we know it on SQL Server. We also cannot export a database and import it to an existing database.

You can import with a new name and then drop the existing database, and rename the name of the imported database to the name of the dropped database.

You can also use an initial sync of Azure SQL Data Sync to migrate all you data from one database to another. Not only your databases can be located on different resource groups, but also in different subscriptions. The initial sync runs faster on empty databases.