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

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 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 automatic backup to restore the database using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, Azure, and .Net SDK.

Backup Storage

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

Backup...