Azure - never ending Full Backup Uploading in Database Migration Service - azure

I have been migrating some databases from a SQL Server to an SQL Managed Instance. 13 of 14 DBs have been successfully restored. There is only one remaining, the biggest one with almost 600 Gb. It has been more than a week continuously uploading the initial full backup and it is still running.
It is a big database but I thought it has been a long time and it should have been finished by now. For this reason I have been trying some cmd/az commands but I don´t get anything more than a running status.
The strange thing is that I can´t see the DB (in recovery mode) in the SQL Management Studio and the file has not been created yet in the container of the Storage Account. All the other databases appear in SSMS and in the storage account.
I had around 75 Gb more than the total size of the databases in the Storage Account, so I guess that was not the issue. In any case, I added 500 Gb more but still no results.
Is it possible to stop the task and restart it to see if this helps? Obviously I would not like to upload all databases again if possible.
Could you please help ?
Thank you!

As explained in the comments before, the best options for the migration of old SQL Servers in my case were:
Check regularly the cpu and network performance of the server.
When you configure your SQL MI, use at least the double storage size of the full DB backups size.
Finally, if you have big DBs, (my case more than 400Gbs), create different activities* to separate the small ones from the big ones. This would help as well if any errors happen into the big DBs. You won´t need to upload all of them again.
*NOTE. I had some issues when I had more than 2 activities: Some of them stayed in "Queued" Status and after a day still did not run. This happened even when the other activities were already completed. So, to fix this, I had to delete all the activities and create the remaining one again.
Have a good day.

I would recommend to open a case with Support to make sure there is no patching or failover happening on the SQL MI during Migration.
I have seen this happen before where the restore is going through for a VLDB and then patching on SQL MI causes it to restart restoring again.
Hopefully this will help

Related

Create database within Azure SQL elastic pool takes almost 10 minutes to complete

We use Azure SQL databases and an elastic pool (level "Standard").
Usually the creation of a new customer database takes approximately 1-2 minutes but suddenly it started taking way longer (up to 10 minutes) and I have no idea why this is happening. I checked the pool in the Azure portal and everything seems fine. We are still far away from reaching the given limits (257/500 databases; ~11GB/200GB data size). Upscaling for a short period of time has no effect.
Is there anything else I can do?
I think there are some ongoing issue at Microsoft cloud services just check if your issue related to that, if that’s true your issue should be temporary

Performance of Web Database against new standard service tier

I have sql azure database. Currently I'm using the "Web" SQL database since my DB was small ie about 300mb and the maximum size is 5GB. I came to know that the Web service tiers will be retired in September 2015 i have restored my my Live DB as a "Standard" s0 which has a maximum size of 2 GB. But what i noticed is the performance with the new standard type database is poor when compared to the retired web edition. Say for instance it used to take like 40 seconds to delete 60 thousand records in the Web edition and it is now taking two minutes to 3 minutes with the new standard type. Have any one experienced this kind of thing or its just me ?
Please give me your suggestions
I had a similar issue; I migrated sql 2008 to Azure web; got a performance hit; then switched from web to S0; got another hit. I think im now at s1
I figured it was probably missing indexes; but with the ability to Trace + tune gone with azure, I had to do things a bit more manually.
First, look at this, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/ff394114.aspx you want to be able to get to the part where you can get the long running queries.
Then, with each long running query; you will want to execute the execution plan. To view a query’s execution plan, we need to explicitly include it before executing the query. Right-Click the query window and select Include Actual Execution Plan.
If this does not help you then you need to do more work; what you will want to do is export the database (it comes out as a bacpac file) to sql 2012 (Right click on the Connection > Databases node and select "Import Data-tier application...") on a local server somwhere (I used an Azure VM); then hookup an application/website to this, enable query analyzer., and tune it the old way., this will reveal all the non-clustered indexes that magically disappeared... once you add those to your sql azure db, you will get performance back.
Sure you could just increase your standard tier., but this can get expensive., its better to tune and find out where things went wrong...

Azure Websites automated and manual backups are not created

Whilst accepting that Backups in Windows Azure Websites are a preview feature, I can't seem to get them working at all. My site is approximately 3GB and on the standard tier. The settings are configured to move to a Geo-Redundant storage account with no other containers. There is no database selected, I'm only backing up the files.
In the Admin Portal, if I use the manual Backup Now button, a 0 bytes file is created within the designated storage account, dated 01/01/0001 00:00:00. However even after several days, it is not replaced with the 'actual' file.
If I use the automated backup scheduler, nothing happens at all - no errors, no 0 byte files.
Can anyone shed any light on this please?
The backup/restore feature is still in a preview mode and officially supports only 2 GB of data. From the error message you posted ("backup is currenly in progress") it seems you probably hit a bug which was there and was fixed last week (the result of that bug was that there were some lingering backups which blocked subsequent backups).
Please try it again, you should be able to invoke it now. If you find another error message in operational logs, feel free to post it here (just leave the RequestId in it unscrambled - we can correlate using that) and we can take a look.
However, as I mentioned in the beginning, more than 2 GBs are not fully supported yet (you might not be able to do e.g. roundtrip with your data - backup and then restore).
Thanks,
Petr

Backup in SQL Azure very slow

I'm currently working on an SQL Database backup strategy in advance of porting our application to Azure. Currently we are using a SQL Server maintenance task to run a backup of our on-premise database once every 15 minutes with a 1 hour retention (thus retaining 4 local copies). We also run a 24 hour backup which gets pushed into Amazon S3.
Now in Azure, I've so far managed to institute a backup of the primary database (to another sql server instance) using the following T-SQL:
CREATE DATABASE targetserver.backupName AS COPY OF sourceserver.sourceName
The source database is approximately 3GB in size and is expanding around 5-10% per month. The problem I'm having is that the copy process is painfully slow! I initiated a copy over 30 minutes ago and it's still running! This means that adopting a 15 minute backup schedule seems untenable in Azure.
So I'm wondering if I can qualify a few things with other users:
Is it normal for a 3GB backup to take over 30 minutes (and counting) to replicate to another server instance?
Should I keep the backups on the same server as the source? I'm very nervous as a few clicks in the Azure portal could wipe out a lot of critical data! I know this is a 'black swan' event but I just wouldn't feel easy having everything running in a single server instance.
Is there a quicker way to backup an SQL Azure Database? I've taken a look at the Red-Gate but it seems expensive to do sub daily incremental backups.
Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
I should add that I am happy to rethink my backup strategy entirely to be more Azure friendly. The key thing is mitigation against administrator error, e.g. dropping a load of important data due to a clumsy statement (the shorter the backup intervals the better) and a 24 hour backup pushed into a different storage method, e.g. blob container.
UPDATE ------
I cancelled the initial backup request after waiting 1 hour and re-initiated. The second backup completed in 5 minutes. I've now gone back to Red-Gate to take a look at their hosted backup solution.
How long copy database takes to run depends not only on the size of the data, but also how many transactions are being run on it at the time, so this option may not be tenable in your situation. Now that you have a backup DB you can test this for yourself by making a backup of your backup and see how long that takes.
Your other option is to export a .bacpac file and store it in blob storage. There are libraries for this but I don't have the reference to hand. This will also be a much cheaper option. I'm pretty sure this is what Red Gate are doing under the covers of their service.

Creating a sub site in SharePoint takes a very long time

I am working in a MOSS 2007 project and have customized many parts of it. There is a problem in the production server where it takes a very long time (more than 15 minutes, sometimes fails due to timeouts) to create a sub site (even with the built-in site templates). While in the development server, it only takes 1 to 2 minutes.
Both servers are having same configuration with 8 cores CPU and 8 GIGs RAM. Both are using separate database servers with the same configuration. The content db size is around 100 GB. More than a hundred subsites are there.
What could be the reason why in the other server it will take so much time? Is there any configuration or something else I need to take care?
Update:
So today I had the chance to check the environment with my clients. But site creation was so fast though they said they didn't change any configuration in the server.
I also used that chance to examine the database. The disk fragmentation was quite high at 49% so I suggested them to run defrag. And I also asked the database file growth to be increased to 100MB, up from the default 1MB.
So my suspicion is that some processes were running heavily on the server previously, that's why it took that much of time.
Update 2:
Yesterday my client reported that the site creation was slow again so I went to check it. When I checked the db, I found that instead of the reported 100GB, the content db size is only around 30GB. So it's still far below the recommended size.
One thing that got my attention is, the site collection recycle bin was holding almost 5 millions items. And whenever I tried to browse the site collection recycle bin, it would take a lot of time to open and the whole site collection is inaccessible.
Since the web application setting is set to the default (30 days before cleaning up, and 50% size for the second stage recycle bin), is this normal or is this a potential problem also?
Actually, there was also another web application using the same database server with 100GB content db and it's always fast. But the one with 30GB is slow. Both are having the same setup, only different data.
What should I check next?
So today I had the chance to check the environment with my clients. But site creation was so fast though they said they didn't change any configuration in the server.
I also used that chance to examine the database. The disk fragmentation was quite high at 49% so I suggested them to run defrag. And I also asked the database file growth to be increased to 100MB, up from the default 1MB.
So my suspicion is that some processes were running heavily on the server previously, that's why it took that much of time.
Thanks for the inputs everyone, I really appreciate.
Yesterday my client reported that the site creation was slow again so I went to check it. When I checked the db, I found that instead of the reported 100GB, the content db size is only around 30GB. So it's still far below the recommended size.
One thing that got my attention is, the site collection recycle bin was holding almost 5 millions items. And whenever I tried to browse the site collection recycle bin, it would take a lot of time to open and the whole site collection is inaccessible.
Since the web application setting is set to the default (30 days before cleaning up, and 50% size for the second stage recycle bin), is this normal or is this a potential problem also?
Actually, there was also another web application using the same database server with 100GB content db and it's always fast. But the one with 30GB is slow. Both are having the same setup, only different data.
Any idea what should I check next? Thanks a lot.
Yes, its normal OOB if you haven't turned the Second Stage Recycle bin off or set a site quota. If a site quota has not been set then the growth of the Second Stage Recycle bin is not limited...
the second stage recycle bin is by default limited to 50% size of the site quota, in other words if you have a site quota of 100gb then you would have a Second Stage recycle bin of 50gb. If a site quota has not been set, there are not any growth limitations...
I second everything Nat has said and emphasize splitting the content database. There are instructions on how to this provided you have multiple site collections and not a single massive one.
Also check your SharePoint databases are in good shape. Have you tried DBCC CHECKDB? Do you have SQL Server maintenance plans configured to reindex and reduce fragmentation? Read these resources on TechNet (particularly the database maintenance article) for details.
Finally, see if there is anything more you can do to isolate the SQL Server as the problem. Are there any other applications with databases on the same SQL Server and are they having problems? Are you running performance monitoring on the SQL Server or SharePoint servers that show any bottlenecks?
Backup the production database to dev and attach it to your dev SharePoint server.
Try and create a site. If it does not take forever to create a site, you can assume there is a problem with the Prod database.
Despite that, at 100gig, you are running up to the limit for a content database and should be planning to put content into more than one. you will know why when you try and backup the database. Searching should also be starting to take a good long time now.
So long term you are going to have to plan on splitting your websites out into different content databases.
--Responses--
Yeah, database size is all just about SQL server handling it. 100GB is just the "any more than this and it starts to be a pain" rule of thumb. Full Search crawls will also start a while.
Given that you do not have access to the production database and that creating a sub-site is primarily a database operation, there is nothing you can really do to figure out what the issue is.
You could try creating a subsite while doing a trace of the Dev database and look at the tables those commands reference to see if there is a smoking gun, but without production access you are really hampered.
Does the production system server pages and documents at a reasonable speed?
See if you can start getting some stats from the database during the creation, find out what work is being done. SQL has some great tools for that now.

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