Getting Started with Azure Blob Storage Backups
By Tom Nonmacher
One of the tremendous advantages of the cloud is the ability to scale resources as needed. The Microsoft Azure platform offers a variety of services and solutions for businesses, including Azure Blob Storage - a scalable, cost-effective solution for storing large amounts of unstructured data such as text and binary data. It's an excellent choice for backup and restore, tiered archive, and disaster recovery solutions. One of the use cases of Azure Blob Storage is to backup your SQL databases. This blog post will guide you through the basics of getting started with Azure Blob Storage Backups for SQL Server 2016 and 2017, MySQL 5.7, and DB2 11.1.
To get started with Azure Blob Storage Backups, you need to have an Azure account. Once you have it, go to the Azure portal and create a new storage account. Afterwards, create a blob container within this storage account. This container will be used as a destination for your database backups.
When it comes to SQL Server 2016 and 2017, backing up to Azure Blob Storage is quite straightforward. You can simply use the BACKUP DATABASE command, specifying the URL of the blob container as the destination. The following T-SQL code snippet shows how to backup a database named 'MyDB' to Azure Blob Storage:
BACKUP DATABASE MyDB TO URL = 'https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/MyDB.bak'
WITH CREDENTIAL = 'MyCredential',
STATS = 5;
For MySQL 5.7, you can use the mysqldump utility to create a backup of your database and then upload it to Azure Blob Storage. The Azure CLI provides commands for uploading blobs, as in the following example:
mysqldump -u username -p database_name > backup.sql
az storage blob upload --account-name myaccount --container-name mycontainer --name backup.sql --type block --file ./backup.sql
As for DB2 11.1, you need to backup your database using the native DB2 backup command and then upload the backup file to Azure Blob Storage using the Azure CLI, similar to how you would do it for MySQL.
Furthermore, Azure provides a managed relational SQL database service, Azure SQL, that supports SQL Server 2016 and 2017, MySQL 5.7, and DB2 11.1. In Azure SQL, you can easily configure automatic backups in the Azure portal. It's also possible to restore databases directly from these backups.
To sum up, Azure Blob Storage provides a convenient and flexible way to backup your SQL databases. Whether you're using SQL Server, MySQL, or DB2, you can take advantage of this service to enhance your backup and recovery strategy. As always, remember that backups are only as good as your ability to restore them, so ensure you have a robust and tested restore process in place.