Before moving a database, organizations need to understand their environment, determine whether they have enough information to assess it, identify compatibility issues and migration risks, select the right Azure destination, determine appropriate sizing, plan the migration, execute it, and validate the outcome. Each step requires different expertise, and customers often need to connect information and decisions across multiple stages of the journey.

SQL Migration Agent Skills are designed to simplify this experience.

These reusable, AI-powered skills help guide customers through assessment, target selection, migration execution, and post-migration validation, reducing manual effort while helping customers migrate with greater confidence. The skills are designed to work across multiple Microsoft experiences while preserving migration context and keeping customers in control of critical decisions

The result is a more connected migration journey:

Pre-assess → Assess → Plan → Migrate → Validate

 

What are SQL Migration Agent Skills?

SQL Migration Agent Skills bring migration expertise into reusable capabilities that can support different stages of the SQL Server to Azure migration journey.

Rather than treating assessment, recommendation, migration, and validation as disconnected activities, migration skills help connect them around the workload and its migration context.

Each skill focuses on a specific part of the journey.

• Pre-assessment considers whether sufficient evidence is available to support the next decision.
• Assessment evaluates migration readiness and identifies compatibility concerns and risks.
• Recommendation uses assessment, sizing, and other available evidence to guide target selection.
• Planning turns findings into actions for the migration.
• Migration helps execute the selected migration path.
• Validation helps verify the outcome after migration.

Together, they turn a collection of migration activities into a more guided experience.

1. Pre-assessment: Do we have enough evidence to assess?

Before asking:

Is this workload ready to migrate?

there is an earlier question worth considering:

Do we have enough information to make that determination?

This is the role of pre-assessment.

A recommendation is only as useful as the evidence behind it. The migration-skills design considers factors such as inventory coverage, assessment status, data freshness, and confidence gaps when determining whether sufficient evidence is available.

This provides an important foundation for the journey.

Instead of jumping immediately to a migration recommendation, pre-assessment helps establish whether the available evidence is sufficient to support the decisions that follow.

It reinforces a simple principle:

Evidence first. Recommendation second. 

2. Assessment: Is my workload ready to migrate?

Once sufficient information is available, the next question becomes:

Is this workload ready to move to Azure, and what needs attention before it does?

Assessment analyzes SQL Server workloads for compatibility issues, risks, and migration challenges that could affect the move. 

The assessment and recommendation model brings together several important dimensions:

Compatibility
Can the workload move to the selected Azure SQL target? This includes areas such as feature support, breaking changes, migration blockers, and remediation paths. 

Assessability
Is there enough evidence? This considers inventory coverage, assessment status, data freshness, and confidence gaps. 

Sizing
What capacity does the workload require? CPU, memory, I/O, and storage demand can contribute to guidance around compute, storage, and performance headroom. 

Pricing
What will the target cost? The design considers factors such as SKU and service-tier assumptions, region, licensing or Azure Hybrid Benefit, and estimated monthly cost.

Together, these signals help move assessment beyond simply identifying compatibility issues toward providing information that can support the migration decision.

3. Recommendation: Where should my workload land?

Once a workload has been assessed, customers still need to answer another critical question:

What is the right Azure destination for this workload?

SQL Server customers have multiple Azure destination options.

SQL Migration Agent Skills provide target guidance across Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, including sizing and suitability considerations. 

This is an important distinction.

Compatibility helps determine whether a workload can move. Recommendation helps provide guidance about where it should land.

The migration-skills design brings together evidence across compatibility, assessability, sizing, and pricing, with decision outputs that include target fit, prioritized blockers, recommended compute and storage, and pricing estimates with assumptions.

The objective is not simply to produce another report. It is to make the assessment information more actionable for the decision the customer needs to make next.

4. Planning: Turn findings into actions

A successful assessment may identify blockers, risks, sizing considerations, or other items requiring attention.

Knowing about those findings is useful. Knowing what to do next is even more important.

Planning provides the bridge between assessment and execution.

The broader migration journey reflected in the SQL Migration Agent material is:

Discover → Assess → Plan → Migrate → Validate → Optimise.

Within that journey, assessment determines readiness, while planning turns the findings into actions that prepare the workload for migration. 

In simple terms, the experience moves from:

“Here is what we found.”

to:

“Here is what needs to happen next.”

That transition from insight to action is an important part of simplifying a complex migration.

5. Migration: Move from planning to execution

Once the target and migration path have been selected, the journey moves into execution.

SQL Migration Agent Skills are designed to automate and streamline migration workflows through guided migration experiences for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance scenarios. 

This creates continuity across the migration journey.

The earlier stages establish what is known about the workload, determine readiness, identify issues, provide target guidance, and prepare for the move. Migration then carries the journey forward into execution.

The progression becomes straightforward:

Assessment establishes readiness.
Planning turns findings into actions.
Migration executes the approved path.

6. Validation: Did the migration succeed?

Migration should not end simply because the data has reached its destination.

After the move, customers need confidence in the outcome.

SQL Migration Agent Skills include post-migration verification and remediation guidance designed to help validate migration success and workload readiness after cutover. 

Validation therefore provides an important closing step to the migration journey.

Instead of stopping at:

“The migration completed.”

the experience can help customers get closer to answering:

“The migration completed, and we have validated the outcome.”

This helps close the loop between migration execution and workload readiness.

Why build migration capabilities as reusable skills?

There is a broader idea behind this approach: migration expertise should be reusable.

SQL Migration Agent Skills are reusable, AI-powered capabilities designed to work across multiple Microsoft experiences, bringing migration expertise closer to where developers already work, including experiences such as GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code. By preserving migration context across assessment, target selection, migration execution, and validation, the skills help create a connected journey from understanding the workload and making migration decisions through execution and validation.

Migration Skills - Migration Skills

SQL AI Skills - Microsoft SQL Skills