Backing up your Azure SQL databases and restoring them to a local SQL Server can be a crucial part of your disaster recovery strategy or testing process. In this guide, we’ll walk you through each step required to back up your Azure SQL databases and restore them locally using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Step … Read more

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (MSSQL 2016) is a very reliable database system, and even today, many businesses still use it. It’s a common approach—if it works, don’t touch it. Moreover, upgrading to a later version of SQL requires purchasing a rather expensive license. In this article, we will discuss how to perform backups and restores … Read more

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (MSSQL 2012) is a very reliable database system, and even today, many businesses still use it, even though it is no longer supported by Microsoft. It’s a common approach—if it works, don’t touch it. Moreover, upgrading to a later version of SQL requires purchasing a rather expensive license. In this article, … Read more

Database migration is a common task for database administrators, but it is often associated with potential issues that may not be immediately obvious. Before starting the migration, there are two important recommendations: 1. Make sure to use the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) — a Microsoft tool that helps identify features that have been deprecated or changed … Read more

In the previous article, we showed how to use the SqlBak API to automate backup health checks: detecting failed jobs, offline servers, missing recent backups, and retention policy issues. The next logical step is to bring that data into Grafana so backup monitoring becomes part of your overall observability stack alongside CPU, RAM, disks, and … Read more

Database backups are often configured once and then quietly forgotten — until something goes wrong. In modern environments, teams may operate dozens or hundreds of database servers supporting ERP, CRM, and other critical systems. At the same time, they are managing many other priorities — sales, inventory, procurement, HR, production, and more — each with … Read more

Starting from version 17, PostgreSQL introduced native support for incremental backups, enabling more efficient and storage-friendly backup strategies. One of the key requirements for incremental backups is enabling WAL (Write-Ahead Log) file summarization. This article explains how to enable WAL summarization by updating PostgreSQL configuration settings. 1. Backup the Configuration File Before making any changes, … Read more

A recovery model is a database property that determines when the transaction log is cleared. The transaction log is a binary file associated with the database, typically with the .ldf extension. It records all transactions performed by users in the database. The transaction log serves two primary purposes: Database recovery after failures. For instance, if a … Read more

Script execution restrictions in SqlBak When performing backup or maintenance tasks in SqlBak, you may encounter errors indicating that script execution has been disabled due to security policies: [SEC:1450#0] – Windows batch scripts are disabled by security policy. or #[SEC:1450#1] – SQL scripts are disabled by security policy. These errors occur when the execution of … Read more