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Implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Azure SQL Databases

Difficulty: Advanced
Duration: 1 minute and 23 seconds
Students: 1,164
Rating: 4.8/5

High availability disaster recovery (HADR) is an integral part of any organization’s data strategy. It is also an essential string to every DBA's bow. In an online world that operates 24 hours a day, going offline or losing customers' data cannot be tolerated. This lesson examines the features that Azure provides to help you make sure your SQL databases, whether they are managed in the cloud or on-premise, are not the point of failure in your systems.

High availability disaster recovery encompasses two fundamental concepts. Firstly, how to minimize the amount of time your databases will be offline in the event of unforeseen events like hardware failures, power outages, or any number of natural disasters. Secondly, it looks at how to minimize data loss when any of these events occur. It is one thing to be offline, but it is another thing to lose data that is already in your custody.

In this lesson, we will cover the full range of Azure options from turnkey to custom and do-it-yourself solutions. If you have any feedback relating to this lesson, feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand the concepts and elements of high availability and disaster recovery
  • Learn about hyperscale databases and how they are used
  • Learn how to combine on-premise with the cloud to replicate and sync your data
  • Understand what always on availability groups are and how they operate
  • Implement geo-replication and failover groups
  • Learn about the wide range of options you have for backing up your databases with Azure

Intended Audience

This lesson is intended for anyone who wants to implement high availability and disaster recovery procedures in place for their Azure SQL databases.

Prerequisites

This is an intermediate to advanced lesson and so to get the most out of it, you should be familiar with SQL Server management studio, database operations like backup and restore, and T-SQL, and also have some familiarity with basic active directory concepts like users and permissions.