This blog is a quick guide on how to back up an Azure Analysis Services cube using PowerShell. The PowerShell is used in a runbook inside an Automation account in Azure to automate the backup process. A pre-requisite for this is to configure the backup storage settings, this details the location of the backups.
Two parameters are passed into the runbook (shown below), where AnalysisServerName is the server name for the analysis services cube and AutomationCredentialName is the name of the credential for the Automation account in Azure.
The following variable is used to store the current date, obtained using the Get-Date cmdlet. This will be used as part of the backup name.
The command Get-AzureAutomationCredential is used to get the credentials for the Automation account provided, in this case it is one of the parameters provided for the runbook. The result is saved to a variable that will be used as a parameter for the backup command.
And finally, the backup command completes the backup of the analysis services cube to a file. Several parameters are used in this command: -BackupFile is the name given to the backup file, -Name is the name of the cube being backed up, -Server is the server name (passed in as a parameter), -Credential is the credentials obtained in the previous step, and -ApplyCompression enables the backup with compression.
I hope you have found this useful! The follow up to this blog about cleaning up the backup files can be found here.
