One of the components of BizTalk360 is a SQL Server database. This database is used for all kind of configuration like user permissions and all the monitoring settings. When that data got corrupted or lost, you would have to do all the configuration all over from scratch. To prevent this from happening, you should frequently take backups of that database. Besides creating manual backups, you can also have these backups being created automatically.
There are two different approaches to making automated backups of this database, both are shown below:
The difference between these 2 methods is, that with the Maintenance Plan approach you’ll have a backup which is not in sync with the backup of your BizTalk databases, while with the latter option your BizTalk360 backup will be in sync with the BizTalk backups. This could make restoring your databases in one go easier.
In a previous post, Rochelle has already explained how to create a Maintenance Plan to take care of the BizTalk360 database backups. In this article, we’ll explain how to add the BizTalk360 database to the Backup BizTalk Server job.
What we basically are going to do is using a feature from BizTalk Server. As you probably are aware of, BizTalk Server contains multiple databases and to be able to restore them in sync, the backup needs to be created in sync. The only by Microsoft supported way to create such backups, is by using the Backup BizTalk Server job, which is a SQL Server Agent job. You can read more about that topic in the below articles:
BizTalk users can extend the backup job with other databases which are considered important to the integrations which are deployed in BizTalk Server. This is exactly what we will be doing with the BizTalk360 database.
The process exists of the following steps:
Let’s take these steps one by one and have that database added to the BizTalk Server backup job!
In this first step, we’ll make sure a table and some Stored Procedures will be created in the BizTalk360 database. The table which becomes created is called MarkLog. You will find this table in all the databases which are being backed up via the BizTalk Server backup job.
Perform below steps to create that table and the needed Stored Procedures:
If both SQL scripts have been executed successfully, an important part of the configuration has been completed. The BizTalk360 database is ready and in the next step, it will be added to the BizTalk Server backup job!
Important: Ensure yourself that the BizTalk360 is in Full Recovery Model, otherwise the backup will fail! You can check this by:
In the previous step, we prepared the BizTalk360 database to be able to be backed up by the BizTalk Server backup job. In this step, we’ll make sure that that database becomes added to a table in BizTalk Server’s management database, which will make sure that the database will be picked up by the BizTalk Server backup job.
Follow below steps, to make sure that the BizTalk360 database will be picked up by the BizTalk Server backup job:
The BizTalk360 database is now part of the BizTalk Server backup job. The last step we need to do is forcing a full backup, to make sure that also incremental backups can be created.
We are almost there; we have seen how the BizTalk360 database has been prepared to accommodate the BizTalk Server backup job. In the previous step, we have added the BizTalk360 database to the BizTalk Server backup job. In this last step, we will force a full backup, to make sure that after that, also incremental backups can be created. By default, a full backup will be created once every 24 hours; Incremental backups will be created, by default, every 15 minutes.
Perform below steps to force a full backup:
There are a couple of ways to check whether the backups are really being created. You can:
To perform this check, perform these steps:
To check the availability of the backup files, you firstly need to check where these files are located. Follow the below steps, to find that location and then check the actual location:
Now the backup files should show. Although we only checked the backup path for the full backup files, this folder might also contain the backup files of the incremental backups.
The BizTalk360 database contains valuable information about, amongst others, your monitoring configuration and the people who have access to BizTalk360. If in case of a disaster, you need to easily restore a backup of your BizTalk360 database, you need to have a recent backup of that database. The BizTalk Server backup job creates such backups. In this article, we have seen how to extend the BizTalk Server backup job to incorporate the backup of the BizTalk360 database.
