Azure SQL Database refresh from Production to development

Question

I'm starting to understand the Webapps for my sites, but need information on Azure SQL Database. If I have a DEV/QA/UAT/PRD environment, would I need 4 databases? Or is there a swapping functionality of that?

And how do I bring the database from PRD to replace DEV/QA/UAT? (IE refresh the lower environments with PRD data)

Answer 1

You can drop the specific database for the DEV/QA/UAT/PRD environment. Then you can use PowerShell, the portal or T-SQL to create a copy of the production database.

You can use PowerShell as shown below:

New-AzureRmSqlDatabaseCopy -ResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" `
    -ServerName $sourceserver `
    -DatabaseName "MySampleDatabase" `
    -CopyResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" `
    -CopyServerName $targetserver `
    -CopyDatabaseName "CopyOfMySampleDatabase"

You can use T-SQL as shown below:

CREATE DATABASE db_copy   
    AS COPY OF ozabzw7545.db_original ( SERVICE_OBJECTIVE = 'S6' );

You can schedule to refresh your environments using PowerShell/T-SQL and Azure Automation account.