Red Gate Sql Azure Backup using Import Export Service

This is pretty cool news to me. Red Gate has a very good track record of supporting SQL Server products and technologies. Well, they just updated their SQL Backup product to a new beta SKU including SQL Azure Backup that is using the Import Export service built by the DAC team!

Red Gate SQL Azure Backup

This gives us a much better user experience than our own CLI tool, or even the soon to be released Azure Portal update.

Import Export Service?

The I/E Service is a Windows Azure based mid tier service that runs in each Microsoft Datacenter. The user submits jobs to the service, and it takes care of the long running operations.

Import Operations

You must have already created a bacpac from your Sql Server database. Put that bacpac in your blob storage account using something like the Azure Storage Explorer.

Then you can use the CLI tool or the Red Gate tool to submit the import job to the I/E Service. That’s it. The service will take care of loading the bacpac from your storage account, and doing the actual import job. The import also has retry logic built in, so if your Sql Server throttles you (common problem), it will retry and resume the operation.

Export Operations

In this scenario you can point either the CLI tool, or the Red Gate client to your Sql Azure database, and give it a new file to put in your blob storage. The job will be submitted, and once complete the bacpac will be placed in your blob store. The database is entirely online during this operation.

What is a BACPAC?

These same bacpac files can be used against on premise databases as well, but not using the service. It is only allowed to talk to Sql Azure hosted instances. There are on premise tools for doing the same operations against a box copy of Sql Server.

See the MSDN page on Import and Export actions from the Sql Server DAC namespace. See the links section below for the codeplex project that includes samples of how to call these operations.

Happy to see this launch

I am so happy to see this launch, and to have worked on the project. I recently left the SQL DAC team to do some more exciting things I can’t talk about yet.

Considering I only joined Microsoft a year ago, I think I have had some pretty big first projects. Maybe not big in technical scope, but big in customer wins. That is definitely one of my big passions, making customers delight in our products.

Kudos to the whole SQL DAC team for making this a reality!

Links

Import Export from Sql Azure Labs – Client side bits for downloading and running against a local Sql Server. Will also work against Sql Azure, but your machine has to be connected for the entire operation. The service allows you to submit the job and move on to other tasks.

Sql DAC Examples project on Codeplex - Open Source CLI Tool example for on premise, and now the service CLI example

Sql Azure – More information about Sql Azure.

SQL DACPAC – DACPAC is basically just the schema from the database in a non version specific manner.  A BACPAC is the schema + logical data (stored in JSON), again not tied to a specific version of the engine.