Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By : Ahmad Osama
Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration - Second Edition

By: Ahmad Osama

Overview of this book

Despite being the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database differs in key ways when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. This book shows you how to administer Azure SQL Database to fully benefit from its wide range of features and functionalities. Professional Azure SQL Database Administration begins by covering the architecture and explaining the difference between Azure SQL Database and the on-premise SQL Server to help you get comfortable with Azure SQL Database. You’ll perform common tasks such as migrating, backing up and restoring a SQL Server database to an Azure database. As you progress, you’ll understand how you can reduce costs, and manage and scale multiple SQL databases using elastic pools. You’ll also implement a disaster recovery solution using standard and active geo-replication. Whether it is learning different techniques to monitor and tune an Azure SQL Database or improving performance using in-memory technology, this book will enable you to make the most out of Azure SQL database features and functionality for data management solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with key aspects of an Azure SQL Database instance, such as migration, backup restorations, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Automatic Backups

Microsoft provides automated backups for Azure SQL databases. Automatic backup consists of full, differential, and log backups. The first automatic full backup is performed immediately after the database is provisioned. The differential backup is scheduled to occur every hour, and transaction log backups are scheduled for every 5-10 minutes. The full backup is scheduled for once a week:

Figure 3.1: Automatic backups

Note

Automatic backups are inaccessible. You can't download or do a manual restore from an automatic backup.

However, you can use an automatic backup to restore the database using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, and .NET SDKs.

Backup Storage

Microsoft gives you free backup storage that is double the size of your maximum provisioned database storage. For example, if you have a 100 GB standard Azure SQL database, you get 200 GB of free backup storage. You can control the free backup storage size by limiting the retention period of the backups...