Because Microsoft has deprecated 2011-era database servers, my weather demo Weather Now needed a new database. And now it has one.
Migrating all 8 million records (7.2 million places included) took about 36 hours on an Azure VM. Since I migrated entirely within the U.S. East data center, there were no data transfer charges, but having a couple of VMs running for the weekend probably will cost me a few dollars more this month.
While I was at it, I upgraded the app to the latest Azure and Inner Drive packages, which mainly just fixed minor bugs.
The actual deployment of the updated code was boring, as it should be.