An organization is running SQL Server on-premises and is struggling with capacity and management overhead. They want to modernize this database quickly by using Google products or services. What…

Refactoring applications to use Firestore, a NoSQL document database, requires significant application redesign and data model changes, making it a slow and high-effort modernization path.

Cloud SQL offers a fully managed SQL Server instance on Google Cloud, eliminating manual patching, backup management, and capacity provisioning overhead that burdened the on-premises deployment. The Database Migration Service (DMS) enables a managed, low-downtime migration path from on-premises SQL Server to Cloud SQL with minimal schema or application code changes. This lift-and-shift approach to a managed service is the fastest modernization route while retaining SQL Server compatibility.

Exporting tables to Cloud Storage produces flat files in object storage but does not provide a managed, queryable SQL Server environment and does nothing to reduce management overhead.

BigQuery is a serverless analytics data warehouse optimized for large-scale analytical queries, not a transactional relational database replacement for SQL Server workloads.