Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Backups

Methods to Export Azure SQL Database

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Abhishek Shaha and Ahmed Mahmoud enumerate techniques to export an Azure SQL Database:

Export Azure SQL Database is a common request for Azure SQL DB customers, in this article we are going to list down some advanced scenarios, on how this can be achievable through various tools not limited to Azure Portal, Azure CLI and PowerShell. In addition, this article will provide alternative methods when it comes to private endpoints and deny public access.

Click through for several options.

Comments closed

Scripting and Automating Power BI Backups

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld backs that thing up:

Basically for every data model, but in particular for large and enterprise-grade data models, it might be wishful to perform backups. Power BI Premium offers a way to perform backup and restore operations for Power BI datasets. This feature, coming from Azure Analysis Services, helps you to take a backup of your dataset logic as well as the data itself and the ability to restore in case your dataset gets corrupted or backend processes have failed. Furthermore, this backup and restore process is also a way to migrate your datasets from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium.

In this blog, I describe what is needed for Power BI backup operations, how you can perform them and how to script / automate them.

Read on for the process.

Comments closed

Amazon RDS: Backups and Patching

Published 2022-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni is not impressed:

While some services include other really useful features (for example the query data collected by the Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance platforms), I wanted to focus on the common value adds to PaaS systems across providers. I made the last two of these bold, because I feel like they are are the most important, especially in scenarios where the vendor doesn’t own the source to the applications. Like Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

Click through for Joey’s thoughts on the topic.

Comments closed

Backups from Secondary Replicas in SQL Server

Published 2022-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan McCaffrey offers up some guidance:

With Availability Groups there has always been a common theme across the industry to offload your database backups to a secondary replica. It sounds great in theory. I know people that have done this. I also know people that “thought” they were doing this. But the question is, should you be doing this?

Your scientists spent so long figuring out if they could that they forgot to ask if they should.

Comments closed

Postgres Backup and Restore

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey is learning about PostgreSQL:

One of the first things I worry about when I’m looking at a new system is the status of the backups. I don’t see anything in PostgreSQL that will lead me to a different conclusion. However, I didn’t realize just how big a can of worms I would open by pursuing backups and restores.

Instead of talking immediately about backups, let’s talk about restores.

This is a bit different from what we’re used to in SQL Server, so definitely check it out if you are looking at Postgres development or administration.

Comments closed

Restoring PostgreSQL Backups in Azure

Published 2022-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey tests a restore plan:

I recently wrote an article about PostgreSQL restores (and by extension, backups) over on Simple-Talk. The restore process within PostgreSQL, without 3rd party involvement, can be a little tricky. However, when you are using a Platform as a Service offering, like Azure Database for PostgreSQL, things get quite a bit easier. Let’s explore this just a little.

Read the whole thing if you’re thinking about PostgreSQL or Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Comments closed

Air-Gapping Backups

Published 2022-01-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan notes an increasingly dangerous problem:

I’m guessing that we’ve all dealt with a computer virus or malware at some point in our lives. Dealing with these issues can range from annoying to absolutely devastating.

Even at their worst, viruses or malware are not typically on the same level as a ransomware attack. Sure, you may hate not being able to access your games or documents on your laptop due to a virus. But when a company is attacked with ransomware there are more financial complications.

Ransomware has picked up steam in recent years, making the idea of keeping backups air-gapped more appealing.

I chatted with a consulting client of mine yesterday about this very thing. One of their customers was hit by a major ransomware attack which put them behind for an entire year (and would have been considerably worse if they hadn’t been using my client’s software, as it has both cloud and on-prem components, so they could safely fall back to the cloud side while they rebuilt their entire on-prem infrastructure from scratch). Recent ransomware will not only encrypt the files on local disk but will also try to figure out where backups get stored, access that location using the backup service account, and encrypt those backup files as well.

Comments closed

Cosmos DB Continuous Backup

Published 2021-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gauri Mahajan explains how continuous backup works in Cosmos DB:

To follow the exercise in this article, we would need an Azure Account with administrative privileges to operate the Azure Cosmos DB service. It is assumed that such an Azure Account and setup is already available and ready for use. The Continuous backup option is not available for all the editions of Cosmos DB and works only under certain configurations. The focus of this exercise is to understand the use-cases and options under which continuous backup would work in Cosmos DB.

There are four restrictions (as of the draft of this article), which should be kept in view while considering using continuous backup.

Read on for those restrictions and then how you can configure continuous backup to run.

Comments closed

Restoring a Database in Standby Mode

Published 2021-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

David Alcock points out a useful database restoration mode:

Here’s a scenario. A user has made several modifications to a database and now needs to restore the database back to a particular point. The problem is that they don’t know the particular time to restore back to, just that they need the database back to before a particular change was made.

If the database is in simple recovery then there’s no options to play with, the database can only go back to the last full and maybe differential backup if they’ve been taken. If the database is using full recovery (I’m skipping over BULK-LOGGED for this post) then we can then apply the transaction log backups taken after the full backup to get back to a point in time by restoring the database with NORECOVERY and then restoring the necessary log backup files until we reach a particular point.

But one of the disadvantages of NORECOVERY is that it doesn’t give us a readable database until we restore with RECOVERY and at that point we can’t restore further log backups to our database so if we have missed anything we’d need to start the whole restore process from the beginning.

Read on for an alternative restore mode which fits the bill.

Comments closed