Azure SQL DB & MI Disaster Recovery: Take command and conquer any crisis!

Co-authors Djordje Jeremic and Mladen Andzic

Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance are industry-leading Platform as a Service (PaaS) database products that are ideal for building applications of all sizes. Both come with core resiliency and reliability promises designed to protect against software or hardware failures.

Occasionally, outages that disrupt service availability may occur, and it is essential to be prepared to manage such scenarios. To ensure greater business continuity, consider taking the following precautions:

1. Enable High Availability
   Enabling domain redundancy ensures: Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance use Availability zone It is highly resilient to local failures.
2. Disaster Recovery Activation
   To achieve cross-region redundancy, enable failover groups. Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance Recover quickly from rare, localized, serious failures.

Failover groups provide a powerful solution for disaster recovery, helping you effectively meet stringent Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) goals. Failover groups provide two failover policies, and have recently changed their names to make their purpose clearer and more intuitive.

1. Customer Care Failover Policy
   (formerly called ‘Manual’)
2. Microsoft Managed Failover Policy
   (previously called ‘automatic’)

We recommend that you set up a failover policy for your customers. Customer CareBecause you can control when to initiate a forced failover based on your organization’s specific criteria and maintain business continuity.

Microsoft Managed Failover policy, as the name suggests, puts the responsibility of initiating a forced failover on Microsoft. However, forced failover is triggered by Microsoft only in extreme cases, such as a region-wide outage, and a failover command is issued to all failover groups in the affected region. It takes time to assess the impact and scale of an outage, and the focus is on mitigating the outage first. As a result, there can be significant differences in deciding whether to enable a Microsoft Managed Failover policy or the timing of a forced failover, and often the policy may not be activated. See: Additional Considerations About this handicap policy.

1. It is required Set the failover policy of the failover group to Customer Managed.. This gives you complete control over when to initiate a forced failover for disaster recovery by assessing the impact of the outage compared to the potential data loss due to the forced failover. Follow these steps: Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance Update the failover policy.
   
2. If failover groups are enabled, use: Read-write listener endpoint Using this in your application connection string will cause your application to automatically connect to the current default server and database.

Azure SQL DB Resources

Azure SQL Managed Instance resource