Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration

By : Ahmad Osama
Book Image

Professional Azure SQL Database Administration

By: Ahmad Osama

Overview of this book

As the cloud version of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database differs in key ways when it comes to management, maintenance, and administration. It’s important to know how to administer SQL Database to fully benefit from all of the features and functionality that it provides. This book addresses important aspects of an Azure SQL Database instance such as migration, backup restorations, pricing policies, security, scalability, monitoring, performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery. It is a complete guide for database administrators, and ideal for those who are planning to migrate from on premise SQL Server database to an Azure SQL Server database.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Professional Azure SQL Database Administration
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Microsoft Azure SQL Database Primer
4
Restoring an Azure SQL Database
Index

Manual Backups


The conventional database backup statement doesn't work in Azure SQL Database. The manual backup consists of exporting the database as a DACPAC (data and schema) or BACPAC (schema) and bcp out the data into csv files.

The manual backups can be performed in the following ways:

  • Export BACPAC to Azure Storage Account using The Azure portal

  • Export BACPAC to Azure Storage Account using PowerShell

  • Export BACPAC or DACPAC to an on-premises system using sqlpackage.exe

  • Export BACPAC using SQL Server Management Studio

Backing up the Azure SQL Database using SSMS

In this section, we will backup the Azure SQL toystore database using SSMS.

  1. Open SQL Server Management Studio and press F8 to open Object Explorer if not already open.

  2. From the Object Explorer, connect to Azure SQL Server:

  3. Right-click on the toystore database, from the right click menu, select tasks, then select Export Data-Tier Application. In the Export Data-tier Application introduction window, click Next to continue...