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Category: Backups

Automating Power BI Premium Dataset Backup

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shares the first part of a two-part series:

The first part in this 2-part series I am going to explain how configure the Azure Runbook so that you can then re-use it for multiple different Power BI datasets.

I am confident that most people have more than one dataset that needs to be backed up.

Before starting, please make sure that you have connected your Power Per User or Premium App Workspace to Azure Storage

Read on for a high-level overview of how to create a runbook in Powershell, as well as the runbook code.

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Restoring a TDE Database Sans Certificate

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen helps us recover from a big oopsie:

If you don’t have the backups of the certificate and private key from the old server, as well as the password used to encrypt the private key backup then you could be in a lot of trouble. There is one scenario where you have a way out. I’m going to assume you don’t have the possibility to recover your old server from a complete file system backup – if you do then you can do that and access all the keys you require. If the two following things are true though then you can still recover your database:

Read on to see what those requirements are and how you can, in specific circumstances, recover that database.

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Configuring Ola’s Scripts

Published 2023-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Miller begins a series on Ola Hallengren’s maintenance solution:

I recommended creating a database to use for this solution or even installing it into an existing DBA function database. I usually create a DBA database and use it for this purpose and others as well. With this new database, you configure the Database in the header of the maintenance solution SQL file, whether to create jobs, retention time and backup directory for the jobs.

This first post acts as a primer for those who might have the solution but haven’t investigated it in any detail.

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Restoring a TDE-Enabled Database

Published 2023-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen notes how to restore a database with transparent data encryption:

When encrypting a database with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), a vital consideration is to make sure we are prepared for the scenario where something goes wrong. For instance, if the server hosting our SQL instance goes belly-up, can we recover the data that we have encrypted with TDE?

Click through to learn what you’ll need to have.

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App-Consistent and Crash-Consistent Snapshots in SQL Server

Published 2023-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski talks snapshots:

When we talk about snapshots of SQL Server there are two types, application consistent snapshots and crash consistent snapshots.

Application consistent snapshots require freezing IO on a database allowing for a checkpoint to be performed in order to write all dirty pages to disk.

In the past, application consistent snapshots relied on the third party software to call the SQL Writer service but now with SQL Server 2022 T-SQL snapshot backups we have the ability to use T-SQL commands to freeze IO on a database in order for us to take an application consistent snapshot of the database.

Read on for more detail on the topic. With SQL Server 2022, I’ve softened a bit on using snapshots for data retention—prior to that, I was not a fan of the idea.

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Restoring Large Power BI Premium Backups

Published 2023-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers has a hefty backup:

When using Power BI Premium or Premium Per user you get the option to backup the database, there can be occasions when you try and restore the backup and it fails.

The reason that it could fail is because when a restore happens it can consume additional memory which would take you up and over the memory limit.

Below I will explain a new option which allow this to restore successfully!

Gilbert includes a copy of the error message and one new option in the post.

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Backing up SQL Server with Multiple Solutions

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan tells us a story:

Many years ago, a friend was using a backup/recovery tool for managing their backups. This particular tool on its own wasn’t necessarily bad. But in this case, it didn’t work well. In fact, it barely worked at all. Backups were slow to complete and restores were even slower. Attempting to restore even one database could take 10-15 minutes just to navigate a GUI and start the restore process.

It…was…very…slow…

Read on for the rest of the story. Most of the time, when I see two products used for backups, I typically see a bunch of redundant backups, with both products taking full backups.

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DB Restoration and Upgrade Management for Arc-Enabled Data Services

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 9 covers database restoration:

Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployed, potentially one of the most common tasks you will need to undertake is being able to perform a database restore of an existing database to your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

In our previous post, we deployed our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance – “ae-sqlmi-demo” that we will continue to investigate and learn about how we can utilize in our data environments. In this post, we are having a look at restoring a database.

Part 10 looks at upgrade management:

Managing your Data Controller through Azure Data Studio provides an easy approach for controlling when you wish to apply upgrades supplied by Microsoft. This is something you need to stay on top of as the upgrade path is an incremental approach and only allows you to upgrade to the next version. If you leave it too long, you could be faced with multiple upgrades to be undertaken. This could lead to extended outages while you get up to date.

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Timeouts Importing a Bacpac File

Published 2023-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz hits one of the three most annoying parts of dealing with bacpac files:

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding importing a bacpac file, in this situation, was at the moment that SQLPackage was enabling (rebuilding) an index, for example, Enabling index ‘IX_MyIndex’…

The other two are, of course, getting one to export without any errors and getting one to export without timing out.

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