A Simple backup tool for SQL Azure
If you are using SQL Azure nowadays, you probably know that there are only a few alternatives for making backups of your existing data.
- You can use SQL Azure Data Sync, which provides bi-directional data synchronization and data management capabilities allowing data to be easily shared across SQL Azure databases within multiple data centers. This implies you need at least one additional database for backing up your data, and SQL Azure databases are not necessarily cheap to keep them around without any functional use.
- You can use third party tools like the ones offered by Cerebrata or RedGate to synchronize SQL Azure databases with On-Premises databases or dump your data to files
Or you can use Hgdbackup, an OS alternative started by Bertrand Le Roy that uses the SQL BCP command line tool to persist your database data into text-based files. As this was exactly what I was needing for an Azure project, I decided to contribute some code to that tool for storing the backup files to the Blob Storage in Azure. Therefore, you can now specify in the tool the Azure storage account you want to use to store your backup files, or restore your database from.
The tool uses the raw REST API for the Blob Storage service so the Azure SDK or the binaries included on it are not required. This means the tool is very simple to distribute or run in a server with minimal requisites.
The following examples illustrates how you can run the tool for making a new backup or restore an existing database.
Backup Example
Hgdbackup.exe /S:tcp:YOUR_Server.database.windows.net /D:YOUR_DB /U:YOUR_USER /P:YOUR_PASSWORD /A:YOUR_BLOB_ACCOUNT /K:YOUR_BLOB_KEY /T:"Server={0},1433;Database={1};User Id={2};Password={3};Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;"
Restore Example
Hgdrestore.exe /S:.\SQLExpress /D:YOUR_DB /C:YOUR_BLOB_CONTAINER /A:YOUR_BLOB_ACCOUNT /K:YOUR_BLOB_KEY
The backup tool supports an additional argument “C:” for passing the container where you want to store the text files with the data. If you don’t provide a container name, the tool will generate a new container for you.
The good thing about this tool is that it is an open source initiative so you are free to contribute, give feedback or improve it as I did with this support for the blob storage.