Finally we’re going to start using Restore-DbaDatabase after talking about it for a couple of days.
Given all the options that Restore-DbaDatabase offers, we’ll start off simple and build up the complexity of the commands over the next couple of days. We’ll also cover what’s going under the hood of the command, if you’ve got a basic understanding of that a lot of other options make more sense
At the basic level what does a Restore-DbaDatabase run do during a simple restore:
Connect to a SQL Server Instance
Scan 1 or more backup file
Work out whan can be restored from these files
Begin restoring the database(s) to the SQL Server instance
Continue restores until it runs out of backups to restore
Open the database
There’s a fair amount going on under the hood, even for a ‘simple’ restore. Let’s work through those as we build up our first Restore-DbaDatabase command.
Like all tools, Restore-DbaDatabase isn’t able to do everything that everyone wants it to. Certainly, at the moment I’d like it to write it’s own blog posts and fetch me a cold beer, but that doesn’t happen
A lot of the below isn’t complaining about people asking for features. If we can do it, we will, and we’re keen to make this work for as many people in as many situations as possible
But quite a few requests over the years have been non starters for a number of reasons.
Backing up to Azure? Why would you want to do that if you’re not running Azure SQL Database/Managed Instance?
There’s a couple of reasons, which you may or may not agree with:
Reliable storage
Off site storage
Scalable storage
Cheap(ish) storage
All of those of course are debatable depdending on your circumstances. But if you’re starting from scratch and don’t already have a on premises storage infrastructure then it’s quicker to start there and build up. And if you’re running SQL Server inside an Azure VM do you want to be piping data back down to the home network or paying for another VM to act as a backup target?
The main reason I like Azure storage when I can use it is number 2 – Offsite storage.
My backups will survive a major incident, say a failed Data Centre or a major fire. OK, those could be mediated with a secondary Data Centre, but that’s an extra level of expense that your organisation might not be able to justify.
And there are disasters that may affect all storage in your organisation. Ransomware being the one that springs to mind. If your SQL Server backups get encrypted by someone other than yourself, then they are worthless. You have NO way of recovering without paying the money. It has happened!
Companies who think they have good security have found that ransomware can still propogate onto their backup servers as the software is written to exploit any weakness in NTLM or SMB it can fine. However, I’ve yet head of one that can break into SQL Server and get hold of a credential which is what would need to happen for it to even know about SQL Server backups stored in Azure.
And if you’re really paranoid (you’re probably a DBA, so there’s a good chance) you can even use an Azure Function to move all new backups to another Azure Storage account when they finish, so then theres no tracable link anywhere on premises.
Setting up Azure for SQL Server Backups
Now, I’m going to cheat here a little point you at a post I’ve already made that covers setting up Azure Blob storage for SQL Server Backups
As I say in the above posts, I’d really really recommend you go with Shared Access Signatures. Better security granularity, easier to work with and they’re the future.
Once you’ve created your Azure Blob storage account and the SQL Server credential, you can use Backup-DbaDatabase to backup to Azure.
When backing up to Azure you are limited to a subset of parameters, this purely because Azure Blob storage won’t support things like MaxTransferSize. The allowed paramters are:
CopyOnly
Type
CompressBackup
Checksum
Verify
AzureCredential
ReplaceInName
CreateFolder
OutputScriptOnly
EncrytionAlgorithm
EncryptionCertificate
When using a Shared Access key you can also use “FileCount”
Backing up to Azure with Backup-DbaDatabase
There are 2 ways the command can be used to backup to Azure, depending on whether you’re using Access Keys or Shared Access Signatures.
Where myAzureCred is the name of the credential on server1\instance that holds the Azure Access keys. When using the older Access Keys style you cannot stripe backups, so can only provide one URL
With a Shared Access Signature you use this format:
This will work as Backup-DbaDatabase will look for a credential named ‘https://dbatoolsaz.blob.core.windows.net/azbackups/’ on instance ‘server1\instance’
With Shared Access Signature credentials you can stripe files, either within the same container:
Assuming you have valid ‘https://dbatoolsaz.blob.core.windows.net/azbackups/’ and ‘https://azdbatools.blob.core.windows.net/azbackups/’ in the SQL instance performing the backup.
Conclusion
Backing up your SQL instances to Azure can be a good option if your organisation is just starting out, and by having backups off site takes some of the risks during a Disaster Recovery scenario can be minimised. Plus it’s a great way to migrate database up to Azure, in fact it’s Copy-DbaDatabase works.
For more ideas on how to use dbatools to migrate SQL Server databases to Azure have a look at the book dbatools in a month of lunches
One of the great things with dbatools is that you can pull all of the different commands together to make some really powerful scripts for yourself.
Backup-DbaDatabase is no exception. In today’s post I’m going to show you a couple of things you can do with it, and hopefully inspire you to come up with some ideas for your own usage
As your database gets bigger, backups take longer to complete. This makes sense, more data has to be written to disk which is going to take longer.
The reason it becomes a problem is that your organisation will have a Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the most data loss they’re willing to accept in the event of a disaster. Now, it might not be officially announced but I’m sure management has a number that’s lower than you think.
To hit your RPO you need to have less time than that between your backups. So let’s say your RPO is 15 minutes. This means you need a backup at LEAST every 15 minuted to hit this target. If your transaction log backups are taking 20 minutes, you’ll never make it.
Obviously we can’t reduce the amount of data being created, your boss won’t thank you for rate limiting customers!
So all we can do is to make things flow out faster. Let’s see how we do that:
Now, we all take our db security very seriously (or at least I hope we do?). But a lot of people don’t think this through to their database backups
A database backup is a full copy of the database, by definition all of the data is in there
So if someone get’s their hands on it? Then they may as well have dbo on your production database, as they can just restore it on their own SQL Instance and go to town on the data.
That is, unless you’ve implemented some security around your backups
Yesterday we looked at the basics of using the Backup-DbaDatabase function. In all of those examples the backup files were going to the default backup location of our SQL Server instance, and using the default name generation process of Backup-DbaDatabase.
This often isn’t what you want, so we offer you plenty of options on how to create and handle paths
One of the most basic things a DBA needs to do is to take reliable backups. Before you undertake any piece of work you need to have somewhere to roll back to in case it all goes horribly wrong.
The dbatools Backup-DbaDatabase function can really help out here.
While it can be automated with SQL Agent jobs, it’s not it’s real strong point. For that you’re better off sticking with Ola Hallengren’s maintenance solution.
The Basics
At it’s most basic all Backup-DbaDatabase needs is a sql instance:
Backup-DbaDatabase -SqlInstance server1\instance
This will take a full backup of every database on instance server1\instance into the instance’s default backup location
This assumes that you’re running Windows authentication on your SQL instance. If not, you need to provide the credentials to connect with.
You do this with the SqlCredential parameter like so:
There is one other type of backup that is very important to be aware of, the COPYONLY backup. When a SQL Server database is in full recovery mode you want to make sure that you don’t interrupt the backup chain. This can ruin your chances of performing a successful restore.
For instance, if you’re using Differential backups. Each differential backup is the sum of all changes from a specific full backup. If you take a new backup, all subsequent differentials are based on that one. That can be a problem if you’re just grabbing a backup to refresh test or to investigate an issue.
A COPYONLY backup does not break the chain, so it can be removed or deleted once it’s no longer needed without breaking your recovery plan
To take one of these, just use the -CopyOnly switch:
Maybe you want to try something out and see what’s going to happen, but you don’t want to actually do the backup?
That’s what the -OutputScriptOnly switch is for. This will go through all the same processing as a full run would, the only difference is that Backup-DbaDatabase will just spit out the T-SQL without running the command.
will not perform a backup, but will produce this for you:
BACKUP DATABASE [roles1] TO DISK = N'/var/opt/mssql/data\roles1_202004281714-1-of-3.bak', DISK = N'/var/opt/mssql/data\roles1_202004281714-2-of-3.bak', DISK = N'/var/opt/mssql/data\roles1_202004281714-3-of-3.bak' WITH NOFORMAT, NOINIT, NOSKIP, REWIND, NOUNLOAD, STATS = 1
We’ll be covering what some of those other options are in a post in a couple of days
Backup-DbaDatabase Output
Backup-DbaDatabase produces a lot of output that can be of interest. Quite a lot of it isn’t shown at first glance so we’ll take a look at what’s available:
Welcome to Day 1 of 31 days of posts on dbatools backup and restore capabilities.
Wait, that sounds like a lot of posts about dbatools backup and restores? Well, some years ago I did a similar series on standard PowerShell Backup and Restores, and all of that plus a lot more is now built into the dbatools module.
This means there’s a lot of power hidden in Backup-DbaDatabase and Restore-DbaDatabase, but that also means it’s easy to miss features and options. So 31 days is about right to cover everything I think
Currently it’s 1st May 2020, and we’re in a lockdown in the UK. Which you’d think means lots of freetime right? It’s not quite working out like that, so there may be a gap when real life takes over. But I’m going to try my best for a post every day for this month
Why me?
I wrote a lot of the Restore and Backup code, so I’ve got a good idea of how it hangs together and just why it was designed in certain ways. It wasn’t just to annoy people, there was a plan to offer some big power featured. Really!
About the examples
Just to prove the flexibility of things I’ll be using as many different versions of PowerShell and SQL Server to demo thing. If you want to follow along then Windows PowerShell 5.1 and Sql Server -gt 2008 will be fine.
Level
We’ll be starting off with simple concepts and examples, and then building on those. Most things we’ll be looking at won’t be to technical unless we’re inside the functions. If something doesn’t make sense, then please let me know and I’ll do my best to clear anything up.
So, that’s Day 1. Tomorrow we’ll begin by taking a look at the basics of Backup-DbaDatabase
