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SQL Database MI benefits — 9 Comments

  1. Do you have a reference for controlling whether or not new features are used? We have a scenario where we will need to backup an MI to a VM, and as far as we can tell the MI will always be on a later version of SQL Server than the VM, so the backup/restore process won’t work.

      • Well one use case would be if I wanted to get off MI.

        In our case we have a dev server stood up in IAAS for running conversions. It looks like we will have to rebuild as an MI, almost as soon as we built it, and I’m trying to understand our options.

        I’m just trying to understand your comment “New features are added to MI every few weeks – you can choose to use them or not. “. I suppose you don’t mean that you can choose whether or not they happen, just choose whether or not you want to use the new features. I thought you meant the former.

        • Yes, I mean you can choose to use the new feature or not, but can’t prevent them from happening. Can you clarify the use case that would make you want to get off MI? I just have not seen customers who decide to go back to a VM after using MI, so would like to hear your possible reasons. Thanks!

          • I have no reason to do it, it just seems to me to be the most likely use case. MI seems to lock you in, and not everyone wants that.

            Another use case would be restoring your MI to a dev environment which isn’t MI.

            I did read of a Microsoft tool called bacpac, but I haven’t read up on it.

            • Oliver, is your use case best stated as a desire to use IaaS for an an anlytical development sandbox for experimentation….using the existing prod structures as a starting point……with the obvious cautionary tale of balancing needs of decreased red tape vs “dev” inadvertently becoming “experimental production”?

              • In my case, I’m doing database conversions, and because one database is on MI, they must all be on MI. So choice is limited if it’s difficult to get off MI. I wanted to understand the alternatives. And it struck me that it’s hard to get off MI if you wanted/needed to. Our development machine will have to be MI, for instance. Nothing to do with experimental just reduced choices.

                It would seem that bacpac will output a schema and some bcp files in a structure, and you can use that to import. So that overcomes the backup issue. I’m told by the DBA it’s slow, but we haven’t tested it.

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