Currently I am tasked with researching a solution to easily copying data from one environment to another (QA to DEV for example) as well as having the flexibility of going to different times to compare our data. It is an easy task to do locally with SSMS and I am looking for the best ways to do it using Azure and it's tools.
These are the options that I found so far:
Backup Service and Backup Vault (The MS solution that I am not asking for. They don't generate .bak files)
Azure Function to execute generate and transfer SQL (flexible but the code needs to be maintained + manage authentication)
Powershell process with Azure Automate (Flexible too but needs to be maintained)
Datafactory/SSIS (Still learning and researching)
Anyone got any tools/methods that are worth looking into before I dive deeper with a solution?
For Azure SQL database, SQL Data Sync is one of feature for the data sync between Azure SQL and SQL server(on-premise). Some limits are that Azure SQL database must be hub and each must have a primary key. That may not suit you.
Per my experience, Data Factory is the best one for you. You can copy the data between different environment, in Sink settings, we can using upsert(insert or update) operation to sync the data.
If you only want to schedule the backup automatically for the SQL, the third-part tool also could feed your request: SQL Backup and FTP.
Since you have searched a lot and found almost all the options in Azure, all the ways can achieve that. You need to know your real request, data sync or auto backup create the .bacpac file to storage. That's not a good question to help you find the best way. The way you like, the way is the best.
I went with writing an Azure Automate powershell script. including cmdlts like New-AzureRmSqlDatabaseExport and passing in the parameters was ticky but it finally did the job.
Related
Unable to make a copy of the database using the following SQL command or through the Azure portal
CREATE DATABASE mydatabase_copy AS COPY OF mydatabase;
Unable to make a copy of the database on Azure SQL Server, no wizard is present
we know there is a way of creating bacpac and restoring it, but this is a complete manual process and take too much time
we need some automated way to achieve this.
CREATE DATABASE ... AS COPY OF is not available in Managed Instance, only in SQL Database. Instead use Point-in-time restore
Use point-in-time restore (PITR) to create a database as a copy of
another database from some time in the past. This article describes
how to do a point-in-time restore of a database in Azure SQL Managed
Instance.
Point-in-time restore is useful in recovery scenarios, such as
incidents caused by errors, incorrectly loaded data, or deletion of
crucial data. You can also use it simply for testing or auditing.
Backup files are kept for 7 to 35 days, depending on your database
settings.
Which you can automate with PowerShell.
I have a backup file that came from Server A and I copied that .bak files into my local and setup that DB into my Sql Server Management Studio. Now After setting it up I deployed it in Azure Sql Database. But now there were change in the Data in Server A because it's still being used, so I need to get all those changes to the Azure SQL Database that I just deployed. How am I going to do that?
Note: I'm using Azure for my server and I have a local copy of Server A database. So basically in terms of data and structure my local and the previous Server A db is the same. But after a few days Server A data is now updated and my local DB is still the same as when I just backup the db in Server A.
How can I update the DB in Azure to take all the changes in Server A and deploy it in Azure?
You've got a few choices. It's just about migrating data. It's also a question of which data you're going to migrate. Let's say it's a neat, complete replacement. Then, I'd suggest looking at the bacpac mechanism. That's a way to export a database, it's structure and data, then import it into a new location. This is one mechanism of moving to Azure.
If you can't simply replace everything, you need to look at other options. First, there's SSIS. You can build a pipeline to move the data you need. There's also export and import through sqlcmd, which can connect to Azure SQL Database. You can also look to a third party tool like Redgate SQL Data Compare as a way to pick and choose the data that gets moved. There are a whole bunch of other possible Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) tools out there that can help.
Do you want to sync schema changes as well as Data change or just Data? If it is just Data then the best service to be used would be Azure Data Migration Service, where this service can help you copy the delta with respect to Data to Azure incrementally, both is online and offline manner and you can also decide on the schedule.
I am very new to Azure, so posting this query. I just want to copy a flat file from an on-prem server to Azure BLOB storage daily basis. I thought "azcopy" will be a good solution for this requirement. But challenge is we can not configure "azcopy" utility in that on-prem server and can not schedule any cron job as this sever is owing by our client. So we thought of running "azcopy" utility from one of the Unix VM in Azure cloud and want to pull the file and transfer to Azure BLOB storage.
I am not getting any clear idea from documentation that "azcopy" can work as a pull manner or not.
Can anyone help me to understand whether my approach will work or not ? and if not then please give me some idea how to do this.
Please see below diagram depicting what I want to achieve.
AzCopy is not designed to be used in that way.
If there's any way for you to access the file, that will be up to your customer and you'd have to ask their network security folks how they would expect it to be done. But most customers (or at least all the ones I worked with before joining Microsoft) prefer push not pull models, since the security for push is more standard and easier to set up.
I have several external data APIs that I access using some Python scripts. My scripts run from an on-premises server, transform the data, and store it in a SQL Server database on the same server. I suppose it's a rudimentary ETL system run with Python and T-SQL.
The system is about to grow quite a bit with new APIs and will require more complex data pipelines (for example, some of the API data will be spun off to more than one table). I think this would be a good time to move the system onto Azure (we are heavily integrated with Microsoft so it will have to be Azure!).
I have spent a few days researching the Azure products that would let me run Python scripts to access data from web APIs and store the processed data in a cloud database. I'm looking for advice on what sort of Azure products other people have used for similar jobs. At the moment it seems I will need:
Azure SQL Database to hold the processed data that can be accessed by various colleagues.
Azure Data Factory to manage, log, and schedule the pipeline jobs and to run my custom Python scripts (is this even possible?).
Azure Batch to run the aforementioned Python scripts but I'm not sure about this.
I want to put together a proposal basically and start thinking about costs but it would be good to hear from someone who has done something similar - am I on the right track or completely off? Should I just stay on-premises? Thank you in advance.
Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse are good for relational data. And if you want to use NoSQL, you could go with Azure Cosmos DB. If you want to use Files to store data, you could use Azure Data Lake.
For python scripts, you could use custom activity or Data bricks for Azure Data Factory.
Azure SQL Warehouse should be used if the amount of data you want to load is in petabytes. Also, Azure Data warehouse is not meant for complex transformations. I would recommend it for plain data load with PolyBase.
I'm new to Azure eco system. I'm doing some research on copying data from on-prem to azure. I found following options:
AzCopy
Azure Data Factory (Copy Data Tool)
Data Management Gateway
Ours is a Microsoft shop; so, I'm looking for tools that gel with MS platform. Also, down the line, we want to automate the entire thing as much as we can. So, I think, Azure Storage Explorer is out of the question. Is there a preference among the above 3. Or, are there any better tools?
I think you are mixing stuff, Copy Data Tool is just an Azure Data Factory Wizard to make some sample data moving between resources. Azure Data Factory uses the data management gateway to get on premises resources such as files and databases.
What you want to do can be made with Azure Data Factory. I recommend using version 2 (even in its preview version) because its Authoring is easier to understand if you are new to the tool. You can graphically configure linked services, datasets and pipelines from there.
I hope this helped, if you need further help just ask away!
If you're already familiar with SSIS, there's also the option to use SSIS in ADF that enables on-prem data access via VNet.