BizTalk Server databases and their health are very important for a successful BizTalk Server database messaging environment. BizTalk is shipped out with a total of 13 SQL Agent jobs that perform important functions to keep your servers operational and healthy.
Like any other system, all BizTalk Server databases should be backed up and BizTalk Server will provide out-of-the-box a job for accomplished that: Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb) job.
This job makes both Full and Log backups. By default the Backup BizTalk Server job performs a full backup once a day and performs log backups every 15 minutes. This means that once the full backup is performed you need to wait 24 hours for it to automatically do another full backup of the BizTalk Server databases… even if you try to manually run the job, it will only make the backups of the log files.
But sometimes we need, for several reasons, to have the ability and the possibility to force a full backup:
We will have some maintaining plan on the server, or apply a new configuration, and we want to backup the environment
Or simple we will install a new integration application and again we want to have a backup in this exact moment
Each company have is policies, so again for several reasons, we sometimes need to force a full backup of all BizTalk Server databases.
The standard way is to use the “BizTalkMgmtDb.dbo.sp_ForceFullBackup” stored procedure. However, and unlike what many people think, this stored procedure does not perform a full backup it only marks internally on BizTalk Server databases that the next time the Backup BizTalk Server job runs it will need to perform a full backup of the data and log files.
All BizTalk Admins know this (if they don’t know, they should!), however sometimes we need to really on DBA Admins to perform this task, and do not misunderstand me, I have nothing against DBA! All the BizTalk Administration team should be composed by several element with different skills: DBA Admins, network admins, Sys Admins and a BizTalk Admins… each playing its role. But sometime DBA don’t really understand the BizTalk infrastructure and BizTalk Administrator should have an important role advising and helping them (like in other situations it will be the opposite).
And because this is not a day by day task people tend to forget all the steps and sometimes they will create custom scripts to perform this task, but you really need to be aware of two important things:
The Backup BizTalk Server job is the only supported method for backing up the BizTalk Server databases. Use of SQL Server jobs to back up the BizTalk Server databases in a production environment is not supported.
You can use the SQL Server methods to backup the BizTalk Server databases only if the SQL Server service is stopped and if all BizTalk Server processes are stopped.
So to help one of my DBA teams I end up creating this job that is composed by two steps:
Step 1: Force Full Backup
That will call the “BizTalkMgmtDb.dbo.sp_ForceFullBackup” stored procedure
Step 2: Backup BizTalk Server
That will call the standard Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb) job
Note: Of course this custom job should be disabled and manually executed when you need it!
Hope you find it useful
You can download the custom “Force Full Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb)” Job from:
Force Full Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb) Job (863 bytes)
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