Andrea Allred recovers from a mistake:
Recently, the wrong table got dropped and we needed to bring it back. I had never done a restore in an Azure Managed Database before so I learned something really fast.
Click through for the process. And yeah, it is quite easy, though I’ve noticed that restore times are a bit slower than if you were using local hardware on-premises.
One neat trick with database restores in Azure SQL DB: you can’t restore over an existing database, something a client wanted me to do last week. What you can do, however, is restore the database under a new name, so we might have messedupdb and then messedupdb_restore. Well, in this case, messedupdb had no changes since “the incident,” so what we were able to do was rename messedupdb to messedupdb_dropme and rename messedupdb_restore to messedupdb. Azure SQL DB happily rolls on with this and after ensuring that the database was now in prime condition, we could drop the old version. It’s a little more complex than simply restoring over the existing database, but all the relevant metadata Azure SQL DB needs stayed in sync along the way, so the process was smooth.