Backup and Recovery

In the last decade, Microsoft has brought SQL Server a long way – bringing in things like .NET code, data encryption, partitioning, and a darned slick management user interface. But one of the things that hasn’t changed has been the process of backing up and restoring data. We still back up to a file, and…

In my last post, Why Native SQL Backups Suck, I talked about the weaknesses of native SQL Server backups. Today, I’m going to extend that a little by talking about one of the greatest surprises for DBAs in recent history: the advent of dirt-cheap multi-core processors that don’t cost extra for SQL licensing. How SQL…

Before we start looking at SQL Server backup compression software, we need to spend a few minutes looking at the weaknesses of the native SQL Server backup process. In order to judge the fixes, we have to know what’s broken. Native SQL Server backups take the same disk space as the data. When we back…