Mirroring Azure SQL Database to an on-premise SQL Server

Question

I have a database deployed on Azure SQL. Due to various requirements, my company would like to make a continuous mirror of this database to an on-premise SQL Server database. We have explored several ways to implement this, so far to no avail.

The way recommended online, using the Azure Sync tool, didn't work for us -- and seeing as this tool is currently in CTP, it is not currently supported by Microsoft, so we want to implement this ourselves.

The requirements for this mirroring solution aren't extremely high - we only want to make backups every half an hour or so, so continuous synchronization isn't an issue. What would be the best way to approach this without resorting to commercial solutions that seem to be an overkill for us?

Answer 1

We ended up choosing a complete backup-restore from the Azure account to the on-premise VM, since implementing custom retry & incremental query generation sounded way too complicated for this case.

Answer 2

Hummm... it depends what you call an overkill. One way to do this is to wrap up your own BCP commands out of SQL Azure, and BCP into a database on premises. But depending on your database complexity, this may very quickly get out of hands, unless you can identify the top 2 or 3 tables that you really want to export/import to minimize your work. In fact you might event want to consider using SSIS; you will need to manage your own retry logic regardless of the approach you take.

Answer 3

Azure SQL Database support Import Export Database Service including Automated Exports to Azure Storage account.

Using Automated Exports you can define the export interval per day and bacpac files will be created in your Azure storage account which can be imported into your on-premise server.

You can find more detail about Configuring Automated Exports