Azure SQL Databases - Prevent accidental deletes - Azure Locks

Have you ever deleted a database accidentally? If you have done, then you know very well that how it makes you uncomfortable :). If you are managing a very important database and you should make sure that even authorized users cannot easily delete the database without taking an additional action, Azure has a way of configuring it. It is called Azure Locks.

Azure Locks is part of Azure Resource Manager. It allows us to set locks on two ways;

• Read-only - makes sure that authorized users can read the resource but editing and deleting are not possible.
• Delete - makes sure that authorized users CANNOT DELETE the resources.

For example, if you set a Delete Lock at one of your Azure SQL Servers, no resources available under the SQL Server such as A Database cannot be deleted until the Lock is released. You can do the same for a database instead setting the lock at the server level as well.

Here is an example. If we need to set a Delete Lock for one of SQL Servers, get the Server Properties Blade opened and click on the Locks property.

Once the Locks Blade is opened, we can add a lock by clicking the Add Button. As shown in the above image, I have set the name of it as DeleteLock, Lock type as Delete and a small note. Once this is saved, this lock gets applied to all resources that come under the selected SQL Server.

If I try to delete a database in that server, Azure Resource Manager makes sure that I cannot delete the database until I remove the lock.