I have a 1.5 Tb database which I need to move to an Azure server from an on-premises server, within 12 hour overnight windows.
Due to tight bandwidth copying a backup (518 Gb compressed) takes over 24 hours.
What is the best way to accomplish this task ?
I have tried taking a backup, (to a file, not a "backup device"), copying it to the Azure server, restoring it, (tried with and without "NoRecovery"), then taking a differential backup to capture the new data since the backup (while the copy was underway), but the restore of the differential backups fail - different errors depending on the NoRecovery option on the original restore.
Related
I have created a devOps pipeline which executes a task using SQLPackage which takes the backup of our SQL DB in .bacpac file. This export took almost 5 hours to complete. As we are going to take the Production DB backup every night, we want to take only incremental DB backup instead of Full Backup.
Can you please guide me how we can do that using SQLPackage or suggest some other options
Thanks,
Sachin
Azure SQL Database supports Full backup, Differential backup and Transaction log backup.
Differential backup: - It is based on the latest full data backup. it only collects the data which are changed after the last full data backup. You may routinely backup your database without experiencing the burden of complete database backups.
Azure SQL Database provides automated backups.
Full Data Backup - every week;
Differential backup - every 12-24 hours;
Transaction log backup- every 5 to 10 minutes.
Reference: -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/automated-backups-overview?view=azuresql&tabs=single-database
I have a production SQL Server database (2008R2) that performs full backups every night. The total time for the backup takes about 20 minutes. During the time of the full backup, if anything attempts to connect or interact with the database, it appears as though the DB is offline, or their connection times-out.
I've read where when full backups are performed, that any active CRUD actions are still captured, because the backup includes the DB file and the Log file.
What I'm wondering is if it's possible to have the DB still active (even for Reads) when a Full Backup is being performed? Or do I need to just accept that every night, my DB will be unavailable for some period of time?
FYI - I'm using a standard backup command to perform the backup:
BACKUP DATABASE [xxxx] TO DISK = 'xxBackupFilePathxx' WITH COMPRESSION
I'm using SQL Server 2012 in a local environment. In fact, it is running on my Windows 7 machine. My problem is as follows: I receive a daily backup of my SQL database. Right now, I'm just restoring the whole database on a daily basis by deleting the existing one. This restore task takes quite some time to complete. My understanding of the restore process is that it overwrites the previous database with the new backup.
Is there a way for SQL Server 2012 to just modify the existing database with any changes that have occured in the new backup? I mean, something like comparing the previous database with the updated one and making the necessary changes where needed.
Yes, instead of a full backup you ill need a differential backup. Restore it to move to a "point in time" state of original database.
Make a basic research about full/differential and log backups (too many info for a short answer)
I don't believe so. You can do things with database replication, but that's probably not appropriate.
If you did have something to just pull out changes it might not be faster than a restore anyway. Are you a C# or similar dev? If so, I'd be tempted to write a service which monitored the location of the backup and start the restore programatically when it arrives; might save some time.
If your question is "Can I merge changes from an external DB to my current DB without having to restore the whole DB?" then the answer is "Yes, but not easily." You can set up log shipping, but that's fairly complicated to do automatically. It's also fairly complicated to do manually, but for different reasons: there's no "Microsoft" way to do it. You have to figure out manual log shipping largely on your own.
You could consider copying the tables manually via a Linked Server. If you're only updating a small number of tables this might work just fine, and you could save yourself some trouble. A linked server on your workstation, a few MERGE statements saved to a .sql file, and you could update the important tabled in the DB as you need to.
You can avoid having to run the full backup on the remote server by using differential backups, but it's not particularly pleasant.
My assumption is that currently you're getting a full backup created with the COPY_ONLY option. This allows you to create an out-of-band backup copy that doesn't interfere with existing backups.
To do what you actually want, you'd have to do this: on the server you set up backup to do a full backup on day 1, and then do differential backups on days 2-X. Now, on your local system, you retain the full backup of the DB you created on day 1. You then have all differential backups since day 1. You restore the day 1 full DB, and then restore each subsequent differential in the correct order.
However, differential backups require the backup chain to be intact. You can't use COPY_ONLY with a differential backup. That means if you're also using backup to actually backup the database, you're going to either use these same backups for your data backups, or you'll need to have your data backups using COPY_ONLY, both of which seem philosophically wrong. Your dev database copies shouldn't be driving your prod backup procedures.
So, you can do it, but:
You still have to do a full DB restore.
You have considerably more work to do to restore the DB.
You might break your existing backup procedures of the original DB.
I have two MS SQL 2005 servers, one for production and one for test and both have a Recovery Model of Full. I restore a backup of the production database to the test server and then have users make changes.
I want to be able to:
Roll back all the changes made to the test SQL server
Apply all the transactions that have occurred on the production SQL server since the test server was originally restored so that the two servers have the same data
I do not want to do a full database restore from backup file as this takes far too long with our +200GB database especially when all the changed data is less than 1GB.
EDIT
Based on the suggestions below I have tried restoring a database with NoRecovery but you cannot create a snapshot of a database that is in that state.
I have also tried restoring it to Standby Read only mode which works and I can take a snapshot of the database then and still apply transaction logs to the original db but I cannot make the database writable again as long as there are snapshots against it.
Running:
restore database TestDB with recovery
Results in the following error:
Msg 5094, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The operation cannot be performed on a database with database snapshots or active DBCC replicas
First off, once you've restored the backup and set the database to "recovered", that's it -- you will never be able to apply another transaction log backup to it.
However, there are database snapshots. I've never used them, but I believe you could use them for this purpose. I think you need to restore the database, leave it in "not restored" mode -- definitly not standby -- and then generate snapshots based on that. (Or was that mirroring? I read about this stuff years ago, but never had reason to use it.)
Then when you want to update the database, you drop the snapshot, restore the "next" set of transaction log backups, and create a fresh snapshot.
However, I don't think this would work very well. Above and beyond the management and maintenance overhead of doing this, if the testers/developers do a lot of modifications, your database snapshot could get very big, even bigger than the original database -- and that's hard drive space used in addition to the "original" database. For infrequently modified databases this could work, but for large OLTP systems, I have serious doubts.
So what you really want is a copy of Production to be made in Test. First, you must have a current backup of production somewhere??. Usually on a database this size full backups are made Sunday nights and then differential backups are made each night during the week.
Take the Sunday backup copy and restore it as a different database name on your server, say TestRestore. You should be able to kick this off at 5:00 pm and it should take about 10 hours. If it takes a lot longer see Optimizing Backup and Restore Performance in SQL Server.
When you get in in the morning restore the last differential backup from the previous night, this shouldn't take long at all.
Then kick the users off the Test database and rename Test to TestOld (someone will need something), then rename your TestRestore database to be the Test database. See How to rename a SQL Server Database.
The long range solution is to do log shipping from Production to TestRestore. The at a moments notice you can rename things and have a fresh Test database.
For the rollback, the easiest way is probably using a virtual machine and not saving changes when you close it.
For copying changes across from the production to the test, could you restore the differential backups or transaction log backups from production to the test db?
After having tried all of the suggestions offered here I have not found any means of accomplishing what I outlined in the question through SQL. If someone can find a way and post it or has another suggestion I would be happy to try something else but at this point there appears to be no way to accomplish this.
Storage vendors (as netapp) provide the ability to have writeable snapshots.
It gives you the ability to create a snapshot within seconds on the production, do your tests, and drop/recreate the snapshot.
It's a long term solution, but... It works
On Server1, a job exists that compresses the latest full backup
On Server2, there's a job that performs the following steps:
Copies the compressed file to a local drive
Decompresses the file to make the full backup available
Kills all sessions to the database that is about to be restored
Restores the database
Sets the recovery model to Simple
Grants db_owner privileges to the developers
Ref:http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/archive/2009/02/25/How-to-refresh-a-SQL-Server-database-automatically.aspx
I would like to save my backups from my SQL 2008 server to another server location.
We have 2 servers:
Deployment server
File Server
The problem is that the deployment server doesn't have much space. And we keep 10 days backups of our databases. Therefore we need to store our backups on an external "file server". The problem is that SQL doesn't permit this.
I've tried to run the SQL 2008 service with an account that has admin rights on both pc's (domain account), but this still doesn't work.
Any thoughts on this one.
Otherwise we'll have to put an external harddisk on a rack server and that's kinda silly no?
EDIT:
I've found a way to make it work.
You have to share the folder on the server. Then grant the Development Server (the PC itself) write permissions. This will make external backups possible with SQL server.
Don't know if it's safe though, I find it kinda strange to give a computer rights on a folder.
You can use 3rd party tools like SqlBackupAndFTP
There are several ways of doing this already described, but this one is based on my open source project, SQL Server Compressed Backup. It is a command line tool for backing up SQL Server databases, and it can write to anywhere the NT User running it can write to. Just schedule it in Scheduled Tasks running with a user with appropriate permissions.
An example of backing up to a share on another server would be:
msbp.exe backup "db(database=model)" "gzip" "local(path=\\server\share\path\model.full.bak.gz)"
All the BACKUP command options that make sense for backing up to files are available: log, differential, copy_only, checksum, and more (tape drive options are not available for instance).
you might use a scheduler to move backups after a certain amount of time after the backup started with a batch file.
If I remember correctly there's a hack to enable the sql server to back up on remote storage, but I don't think a hack is the way to go.
Surely the best possibility may be to use an external backup tool which supports the use of agents. They control when the backup starts and take care of the files to move around.
Sascha
You could create a nice and tidy little SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package to both carry out the backup and then move the data to your alternative file store.
Interestingly enough, the maintenance plans within SQL Server actually use SSIS components. These same components are available to use within the Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS).
I hope this is clear but let me know if you require further assistance.
Cheers, John
My experiences older versions of MSSQL, so there may be things in SQL2008 which help you better.
We are very tight on disk space on some of our old servers. These are machines at our ISP and their restore-from-tape lead time is not good - 24 hours is not uncommon :( so we need to keep a decent online backup history.
We take full backup on Sunday, differential backup each other night, and TLog backups every 10 minutes.
We force Tlog backups every minute during table/index defrag and statistics update - this is because these are the most TLog-intensive tasks that we run, and they were previously responsibly for determining the size of the standing Tlog file; since this change we've been able to run the TLog standing size about 60% smaller than before.
Worth watching the size of Diff backups though - if it turns out that by the Wednesday backup your DIFF backup is getting close to the size of the Full backup you might as well run a Full backup twice a week and have smaller Diff backups for the next day or two.
When you delete your Full or Diff backup files (to recover the disk space) make sure you delete the TLog backups that are earlier. But consider your recovery path - would you like to be able to restore last Sunday's Full backup and all Tlogs since, or are you happy that for moment-in-time restore you can only go back as far as last night's DIFF backup? (i.e. to go back further you can only restore to FULL / DIFF backup, and not to point-in-time) If the later you can delete all earlier Tlog backups as soon as you have made the DIFF backup.
(Obviously, regardless of that, you need to get the backups on to tape etc. and to your copy-server, you just don't have to be dependant on tape recovery to make your Restore, but you are losing granularity of restore with time)
We may recover the last Full (or the Last Full plus Monday's DIFF) to a "temporary database" to check out something, and then drop that DB, but if we really REALLY had to restore to "last Monday 15-minutes-past-10 AM" we would live with having to get backups back from tape or off the copy-server.
All our backup files are in an NTFS directory with Compress set. (You can probably make compressed backups direct from SQL2008??, the servers we have which are disk-starved are running SQL2000). I have read that this is frowned upon, but never seen good reasoning why, and we've never had a problem with it - touch wood!
Some third-party backup software allows setting specific user permissions for network locations. So it doesn't matter what perrmissions SQL Server service account has. I would recommend you to try EMS SQL Backup, which also supports backup compression 'on fly' to save storage space.