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Category: Backups

Tips for Using Azure Backup for SQL Server

Published 2024-07-15 by Kevin Feasel

Anna Hoffman, et al, share some tips and tricks:

We recently worked with a customer that migrated their Windows and SQL Servers to Azure that wanted to use Azure Backup for a consistent enterprise backup experience. The SQL Servers had multiple databases of varying sizes, some that were multi-terabyte.  A single Azure Backup vault was deployed using a policy that was distributed to all the SQL Servers. During the migration process, the customer observed issues with the quality of the backups and poor virtual machine performance while the backups were running. We worked through the issues by reviewing the best practices, modifying the Azure Backup configuration, and changing the virtual machine SKU. For this specific example, the customer needed to change their SKU from Standard_E8bds_v5 to Standard_E16bds_v5 to support the additional IOPS and throughput required for the backups.  They used premium SSD v1 and the configuration met the IOPS and throughput requirements.  

In this post, we share some of the techniques we used to identify and resolve the performance issues that were observed. 

Read on to learn more about how Azure Backup works and troubleshooting mechanisms.

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sp_delete_backuphistory Removes Restore History Too

Published 2024-07-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones susses out a problem:

I had a customer that was looking to document a restore that had occurred on one of their systems and didn’t see it. They had concerns about SQL Server accurately tracking history across time and noted they hadn’t cleaned any history.

We dug through some of their instance jobs and found one that ran sp_delete_backuphistory. The person didn’t realize this removes restore history as well. This post talks a bit about how this works.

Read on for the full story.

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Have a Recovery Strategy

Published 2024-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand has a public service announcement:

I’ve talked about it before; you shouldn’t have a backup strategy, you should have a recovery strategy. I can’t possibly care if my backups succeed if I’m not bothering to test that they can be restored. And if they can’t be restored then, both technically and practically, I don’t have backups.

In one of the systems I manage, they built a very simple “test restore” process long before I became involved. Every night, it would pull the full backup for each database, restore it on a test system, and run DBCC CHECKDB against it. It would alert on any failure, of course, but the primary purpose was to always be confident that the backups could, in fact, be restored.

Aaron now has a much more robust version of this in place, which you can see in the article.

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Security Tips for Backups in SQL Server

Published 2024-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Walsh shares a few tips:

There are obviously many things to check when it comes to SQL Server security. We’re talking about a lot of those elements of security this month. Today I want to talk a little more about backups as it relates to their role in securing your SQL Servers.

When it comes to your backups and security in SQL Server –>

Read on for five tips to help ensure your backup strategy is doing what you intend it to do, but is also not a real attack vector at the same time.

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Restoring a SQL Server 2000 Backup in 2024

Published 2024-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West turns back the clock:

Problem statement: I have a SQL Server 2000 database backup that I need to restore to a supported version of SQL Server (preferably SQL Server 2022). How do I do that?

Read on for Randolph’s answer on how to do this. Pre-2008, things may get a little shaky, as that’s back when Microsoft really deprecated functionality. So even if you do restore a backup using this technique, I do wonder what happens if you were using a deprecated datatype like NTEXT or TIMESTAMP. As of SQL Server 2022, those are still in the product, so I don’t have a good example so much as a bit of niggling paranoia.

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Unhelpful Error Restoring Azure SQL MI Database

Published 2024-05-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little encounters an error:

What’s it like to be a Database Administrator for managed databases in Azure? Sometimes it’s a painful guessing game when a routine, core operation– restoring a database – fails with a most unhelpful error.

In this case, if the restore is run via PowerShell, following Microsoft guidance, the error message is:

Restore-AzSqlInstanceDatabase: Long running operation failed with status ‘Failed’. Additional Info: An unexpected error occured while processing the request. [sic]

Somehow the misspelling of ‘occurred’ stings a bit more. Did anyone review the PR for this code?

I’m trying to weigh in my mind whether this error is worse than “String or binary data would be truncated.” One the one hand, the spelling is correct in the latter error message. On the other hand, it uses passive voice. On the gripping hand, they’re both nigh-useless error messages. Hopefully the SQL MI team fixes Kendra’s error message at least as well as the database engine fixed the latter.

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Backup Storage Redundancy in Cosmos DB

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Manvendra Singh talks about backups:

This article will explain backup storage redundancy for Azure Cosmos DB. Backups are a critical feature to keep copies of our data to ensure data protection and recoverability in case of any accidental deletion, updating, or any kind of disaster. But this is not enough to run backups only to save its copies. We must also protect those backup copies from accidental deletes or corruption and ensure their proper resiliency should be in place to keep backups safe from any unforeseen circumstances. It depends on the criticality of your data whether you want to keep them locally to want to replicate them in other locations or regions to ensure their resiliencies.

The backup process isn’t the same as with a relational database, but it’s still critical to back up your data, for the same reasons that you’d take backups of relational data.

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Switching All SQL Server Databases to Simple Recovery Model

Published 2024-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea doesn’t need no steenkin’ transaction log backups:

This brief post contains a script that can help switch a whole SQL Server instance, model and all user databases, to SIMPLE recovery.

The script is useful in case of dev/test/QA/UAT instances that have been left by accident to use the default FULL recovery model, yet do not have or need transaction log backups.

Read on for the script. It also shrinks the transaction log file after the switch-over.

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Cannot Open Backup Device with SQL Managed Instance and SAS Token

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sam Garth troubleshoots an issue:

On a recent case, a customer was trying to restore a database from a storage account using a SAS token when they received the below error.

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch.
(Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

Additional information:
Cannot open backup device
‘https://storage.blob.core.windows.net/container/dbbackup_2024_03_21_121901.bak‘
Operating system error 86(The specified network password is not correct.).
RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201)

Read on for the troubleshooting steps Sam followed to solve the problem.

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Comparing pg_basebackup Compression Settings

Published 2024-03-28 by Kevin Feasel

Kaarel Moppel puts on the lab coat and safety glasses:

In my last post I did a quick check on the performance of the newer (lz4, zstd) pg_dump compression options, which included setting up a small framework to download some openly available “real life”-ish sample datasets. And the general result was that, indeed – the new algos in lower levels provide the best value, especially zstd.

But pg_dump is about compressing essentially text based data…but how about binary Postgres data? Thus the tool to test here additionally is pg_basebackup, with its newer (v15+) compression options. So let’s see if something stands out consistently again.

Click through for the test results.

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