If you are installing Pulse v5.6 or a later version on a brand new server, you do not need to worry about the migration of the Pulse databases because Pulse will start with one h2 database.
Migration to the new h2 database
Starting with v5.6, Pulse uses now only one default h2 database. If you upgrade Pulse to v5.6 or a later version, the first time Pulse starts, it will migrate the data from the two legacy databases (docs.h2.db and Monitor.db to a new h2 database (docs.h2.db).
The speed of the migration to h2 will depend on the size of the databases and on your server configuration.
With the following configuration, the migration to the new h2 took 40 min:
- Monitor.db size is 1.2 GB
- docs.h2.db size is 3.9 GB
- Server configuration (4 CPU and 32GB of RAM)
To check if the migration succeeds, the size of the new docs.h2.db should be approximately the sum of the size of the legacy databases.
Migration to SQL Server (2012 or onwards)
You can decide to move to MS SQL Server anytime after the upgrade but you should make sure first that Pulse is working with the new H2 database.
The steps to migrate to SQL Server are described here.
You need to be aware that the migration to SQL Server is much slower than the migration to h2. With the configuration described above, the migration to SQL Server Enterprise 2016 took 3 hours.
The speed of the migration will depend on your SQL Server version (Enterprise or Express). SQL Server Express has some limitations such as:
- Maximum Compute Capacity Used by a Single Instance: Limited to lesser of 1 Socket or 4 cores
- Maximum memory utilized is 1GB
- Maximum relational Database size is 10 GB
SQL Server Enterprise will migrate the data using the maximum performance of your server, whereas SQL Server Express will be limited to 1GB of Ram and 4 cores. The migration will take a long long time if you choose SQL Server Express.
For the reasons described above, we do not recommend to use SQL Server Express with Pulse.