| title | description | services | author | ms.author | manager | editor | ms.service | ms.topic | ms.date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Overview of business continuity with Azure Database for MySQL |
Overview of business continuity with Azure Database for MySQL. |
mysql |
ajlam |
andrela |
kfile |
jasonwhowell |
mysql |
article |
02/28/2018 |
This overview describes the capabilities that Azure Database for MySQL provides for business continuity and disaster recovery. Learn about options for recovering from disruptive events that could cause data loss or cause your database and application to become unavailable. Learn what to do when a user or application error affects data integrity, an Azure region has an outage, or your application requires maintenance.
Azure Database for MySQL provides business continuity features that include automated backups and the ability for users to initiate geo-restore. Each has different characteristics for Estimated Recovery Time (ERT) and potential data loss. Once you understand these options, you can choose among them, and use them together for different scenarios. As you develop your business continuity plan, you need to understand the maximum acceptable time before the application fully recovers after the disruptive event - this is your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). You also need to understand the maximum amount of recent data updates (time interval) the application can tolerate losing when recovering after the disruptive event - this is your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
The following table compares the ERT and RPO for the available features:
| Capability | Basic | General Purpose | Memory optimized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Point in Time Restore from backup | Any restore point within the retention period | Any restore point within the retention period | Any restore point within the retention period |
| Geo-restore from geo-replicated backups | Not supported | ERT < 12 h RPO < 1 h |
ERT < 12 h RPO < 1 h |
Important
Deleted servers cannot be restored. If you delete the server, all databases that belong to the server are also deleted and cannot be recovered.
You can use the service’s backups to recover a server from various disruptive events. A user may accidentally delete some data, inadvertently drop an important table, or even drop an entire database. An application might accidentally overwrite good data with bad data due to an application defect, and so on.
You can perform a point-in-time-restore to create a copy of your server to a known good point in time. This point in time must be within the backup retention period you have configured for your server. After the data is restored to the new server, you can either replace the original server with the newly restored server or copy the needed data from the restored server into the original server.
Although rare, an Azure data center can have an outage. When an outage occurs, it causes a business disruption that might only last a few minutes, but could last for hours.
One option is to wait for your server to come back online when the data center outage is over. This works for applications that can afford to have the server offline for some period of time, for example a development environment. When data center has an outage, you do not know how long the outage might last, so this option only works if you don't need your server for a while.
The other option is to use the Azure Database for MySQL's geo-restore feature that restores the server using geo-redundant backups. These backups are accessible even when the region your server is hosted in is offline. You can restore from these backups to any other region and bring your server back online.
Important
Geo-restore is only possible if you provisioned the server with geo-redundant backup storage. If you wish to switch from locally redundant to geo-redundant backups for an existing server, you must take a dump using pg_dump of your existing server and restore it to a newly created server configured with geo-redundant backups.
- To learn more about the automated backups, see Backups in Azure Database for MySQL.
- To restore to a point in time using the Azure portal, see restore database to a point in time using the Azure portal.
- To restore to a point in time using Azure CLI, see restore database to a point in time using CLI.