Azure SQL - masterdb - Backup

Question

Hi everyone,

When creating a disaster recovery plan for Azure SQL Db's, do I need to also take into account backups of the master db ? Can the master db get corrupted ? Or is it all handled by the infrastructure, and azure automatically handles all the backups for the master db ?

Answer 1

Hi @Paul Daniel Lucaciu , welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

The master database records all the system-level information for a SQL Server system. This includes instance-wide metadata such as logon accounts, endpoints, linked servers, and system configuration settings.

In Azure SQL, users have little control over Master DB and it is mostly managed with Azure Infra. While designing the disaster recovery options we need not to worry about taking care of master DB as it gets replicated/failover along with user database. We can try to do manual failover from one server to another, we will observe that master db is replicated to other server as well along with user db. Same with geo-replication.

However, if we go with traditional login and user model, we will find that logins are not migrated with master db and have to manually insert them again. But if we go with Contained Database User Model then this is taken care at the user database level. More details on below article:

Contained Database Users - Making Your Database Portable

Please let us know if this helps or else we can continue the discussion.

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