We use Red Gate Cloud Services to backup our Azure database, as well as some storage accounts to Amazon EC2 storage, etc. It all works really well 99% of the time, but after a few failures in a short time period I opened a ticket with Red Gate.
The errors we got weren’t always the same though…
“Microsoft Backup Service returned an error: Error encountered during the service operation. Database source is not a supported version of SQL Server”
“Microsoft import/export service returned an error. BadRequest Error encountered during the service operation.”
“Expected to drop temporary database ‘<database-name>’ but it didn’t exist, this shouldn’t happen. Please check for a temporary database on your SQL Azure Server”
… as well as a few others.
In Azure you don’t do a “backup” as such. The process is more like create a copy of your live database, export that database to a bacpac file, drop the copy of the database. It seemed like the issue here was usually with the last step where it tries to drop the database copy.
Red Gate basically said the errors came from Microsoft’s side of the fence, so I had to open a ticket with them instead. This made me want to curl up into the foetal position and cry. Instead I forged on and logged the ticket, and after the back-and-forth time-wasting dance they make everyone do, we started getting somewhere (although it wasn’t great news). They’d passed the ticket to the “product group”, but they had some “internal issues with the log mechanism for the export/import service” so troubleshooting was proving difficult. *sigh*
Anyway, eventually they suggested that one possible cause of at least some of the errors was that the Red Gate service was trying to access the database copy before it had finished being created. So Red Gate are investigating that at the moment, and I’ll update this post when I hear back from them. This doesn’t explain the errors regarding the dropping of the database copy (which means that sometimes we end up with a random database copy sitting on the server, costing us money until I manually delete it).
Hopefully I’ll have some further updates on this soon.
Dave