mibuso.com

Here's an interesting scenario. One of my customers wants to have a backup of their database in the cloud, and was asking whether it is possible to log ship an on-premises SQL database to SQL Azure, and use it as the source for disaster recovery. If their on-premises server goes down, they would take a backup of the SQL Azure database and use that to restore the on-premises database. They would never use the SQL Azure to connect NAV to, it would only serve as a copy of the production database.

They've done some shopping around and found that if this is possible, it is much less expensive than having offsite storage, or log shipping to a VM in the cloud.

I don't even know if it is possible to do this, so I figured I'd post the question here. Does anyone have experience with this, or know whether it is possible?

As I understand it with Azure you only get access to the tables, no back end access at all, so I can't see how you would configure log shipping.

If it can be made to work though, then its quite an innovative use of Azure.

Another reason it is not possible: In SQL Azure the tables MUST have a clustered index. SQL Azure needs it to be able to keep its own internal 'cloud-replication'. And in NAV, some NAV systemtables ($ndo$dbproperty I think) does not have a clustered index.
Another problem could be the size of the DB. It has a limit (I think 150GB but I am not sure).

I think the SQL Azure limit is 50 GB.

Checked it out: before it was 50GB. Now it is 150GB.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee336245.aspx#dcasl
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/greg_low/archive/2011/12/13/sql-azure-db-size-limit-increased-to-150gb.aspx

Guess I missed that one. Thanks.