Author: Mika Sutinen

Hi, My name is Mika Sutinen and I'm a Cloud DBA Team Lead at the company called Nordcloud. I've been working in IT-industry for two decades, and I've spend most of my career working with healthcare information systems. I've worked with SQL Server for most of my career, starting with version 6.5 a long, long time ago. My other interests are high availability, everything related to performance (testing, monitoring, etc), Windows operating systems and I'm currently learning more about Azure.

Azure SQL Database SLA is awesome

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, Data Platform, Databases

Microsoft recently released their new SLA, RPO and RTO guarantees for Azure SQL Database and oh boy, those are really something else. In fact they are so much something else, that at the moment of me writing this, no other cloud provider has managed to promise the same level of business continuity for their Platform-as-a-Service database services.

Besides the highest SLA currently in the market Microsoft has gone one step further and is now guaranteeing also RPO and RTO for their service. Now this is very interesting approach because neither Google or AWS is giving any for their own services.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 4: Managed Backups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

You’re now reading the 4th and final post in my SQL Server Backups to Azure series. In previous posts I’ve described how to setup an Azure Storage Account, Blob Storage container an how to take SQL Server backups there. This time we’ll take a look at one more option that puts our backups on autopilot, with destination to cloud!

The feature I am writing about is Managed Backups, option that has been available since SQL Server 2014 but one that I have not seen often used. One reason for that maybe being, that there’s an unfixed feature that makes enabling it bit difficult if you’re not aware of the workaround.

Despite this shortcoming, if you have SQL Servers (on-premise or Cloud) but no DBA to care for them, I’d recommend that you take a look at this option.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 3: Custom Backups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

You are now reading the 3rd part of the 4 part series on backing up databases to Azure. In Part 1 we looked at some of the benefits of using Azure for your backups and in Part 2 we setup the Storage Account with the Block Blob storage container.

In this post we’ll take a look at how to use the freshly created Blob storage with our customized backup routines.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 2: Setting up the Storage Account

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

This is the second part of a 4 part blog post series about backing up SQL Server to Azure. If you’re wondering why you’d like to backup data to Azure in the first place, please read the Part 1 of this series that explains some of the benefits of using Azure for backups.

In this post we’ll look at how to setup your very own Storage Account and how to use some of the nice security features in it.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure, Part 1: Introduction

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA
Gone to Cloud!

I’ve said it before and I say it again: Understanding how database backups and restores work is one of the more important topics for DBAs to understand. This time we’ll approach the topic from the cloud, and more precisely, from Azure perspective. Why cloud perspective you might as? For one simple reason. Even if you’re not (yet) running your SQL Server workloads in Azure, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make use of it for other purposes, such as backups. And while the idea of placing your data into Azure, or into any other cloud platform, might still seem scary to some, I want to help put your minds at ease. To do this, I’ll just point you to this fine piece of documentation describing the Azure infrastructure security. I think you’ll find it quite satisfying.

As there’s quite a few topics to cover with database backups to Azure, I have split the details into 4 separate posts. You’re now reading Part 1, the introduction.

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Moving data (back and forth) with backups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

Backups, backups and backups. That’s pretty much my answer to what should be the top 3 priority topics that any DBA needs to understand well. And that’s what we’re going to be looking at this post, backups! Backups play a vital and important role in keeping your data (and in some cases your career) safe, but they are also great way to migrate data from one location to another.

In this post we’ll look into migration scenario, how to move data from one instance to another and then back again.

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Fun with Filegroups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Databases, SQL Server, SQL Server DBA

Filegroups are an interesting and useful (if not actually all that fun, despite the title) concept within SQL Server. They provide not just a way to group objects like tables together, but also provide a mechanism to help us to speed up the backup, restore and recovery of the databases. And sometimes they can even give us a little help with the performance or to migrate data to disks that have more space available.

In this post, focus will be in archiving a table that we no longer need by making a read-only copy of it. In a real world scenario we’d also consider putting that to a slower disk, if it’s not frequently used, but my demo environment only has a single data disk.

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