With the hurricane bearing down on the east coast of the United States last week, making sure you have a good disaster recovery plan in place should have been a top priority for you. If you happen to be using Azure SQL DB, adding geo-replication is a simple and easy process. On Friday of last week I posted a blog on how to configure asynchronous geo-replication however I do not think the post effectively explains on how easy it is to configure.

So, I created a video. In less than 5 minutes, I show you how to configure geo-replication for a Azure SQL DB database. In this video, you will see me geo-replicate my database from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast.

Keep in mind that this video just shows a test database that has hardly any data in it. If you had to replicate a larger database, it would take some time so planning would be important. The sooner you start, however, the sooner you’ll have a copy of your database safely in another region. Even with the risk of data loss in the event of a manual fail over, it might be better than being completely offline for hours, days, or even weeks.

It is worth mentioning that you will incur additional costs by having another copy of the database replicated in another region, but once the need has passed, you can remove the geo-replication and the secondary database. That is one of the beautiful things about Azure, the ability to scale things up and down as needed. Also, if you replicate to a different country, be cautious of their data privacy regulations. Once you put data there, it might not be able to leave the country.

Enjoy the video and be sure to check back for more videos to come! You can also subscribe to the Denny Cherry & Associates YouTube channel to watch videos from the entire team.

© 2018, John Morehouse. All rights reserved.