November 9, 2006 at 10:32 am
Hi All,
I would like to ask which backup software we all use and your experience with them, which one works best and which one is a no-no.
Lastly, when it comes to monitoring tools, does anyone use any monitoring tools and if so would you be able to recomend one.
Thanks
November 10, 2006 at 2:48 am
Litespeed is awesome if you have large databases. It does exactly what it claims to do and if you use dba procs to handle your backups ( not maint plans and stuff ) the extended proc calls fit right in.
Monitoring - since 1998/1999 I've used the same tool , different names, different owners, SQL Diagnostic Manager, current owner Idera. Virtually no impact on your servers, very easy to use and deploy, you don't need to spend ages reading the manuals to make it useful to you. As a DBA tool it is useful to have in ther background - it won't solve all your problems but it will provide ( amongst others ) worst peforming - by i/o, cpu, time , database etc. etc. Trending stats for all sorts of counters, daily, hourly,weekly etc. etc. Table growth, fragmentation, basic alerts on blocking processes, deadlocks, cpu, long running jobs, open transactions, response time. Oh and loads more - get a demo and have a play. ( It has the ability to show the sql being run by a specific user in real time along with stats on the sql being run i/o, duration etc. - this can be very very useful when tracking down specific problems )
I also use the first version of Terratrax performance monitor, not sure if you can still get this version, it's very simple - captures sql statements with i/o and duration by database. allows you to cut and paste the sql statements to test. Like profiler but in a nice simple package which is easier to use.
other than that I use profiler, perfmon, I'll take traces from both into sql tables and run queries.
I collect internal statistics for trending and performance monitoring. I have specific routine for collecting blocking information and waits which store the information in tables.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/
November 10, 2006 at 8:27 am
We also use Diagnostic Manager and have been satisfied with it. They've had a few updates, which is good to see that they're keeping up to date. I nice feature is "Most Frequent Queries". This enables me to see queries (pivot tables, SPs etc...) that are impacting the system by their frequency rather than their length of run time.
We recently bought SQLSafe backup software also from Idera. It backs up our 220 Gig database in half the time as a regular SQL server backup, and compresses it to 40 Gig.
Since I've beenusing them for a bit, I've discovered little things that are nice, and little annoyances too. I'm sure that's true with all products.
You can get trial versions from most vendors, so you can compare them all.
November 10, 2006 at 9:34 am
Litespeed has been in use here since it was a 2.0 product. But I think most of the others work just as well.
November 10, 2006 at 4:13 pm
We just signed up w/ Red-Gate Sql Backup, I've been extreamly happy w/ other Red-Gate products such as the Sql Prompt and Sql Compare. While Sql Lite Speed is highly tunable, it will compress just as good as Red-Gate, but Red-Gate uses less CPU right out of the box, and is inme was faster at compressing.
ymmv. there are trial versions of each, find a development server and test db's from 200mb to 200gb.
-- Francisco
November 11, 2006 at 6:44 pm
I also am using Red-Gate SQL Backup and have been very happy with it. I currently have over 50 SQL2000 and SQL2005 instances using it and it has been a great asset. I used to use Litespeed however dollar for dollar Red-Gate is a much better deal. As far as monitoring I have used Spotlight and Foglight by Qwest and Diagnostic Manager from Idera. Again if cost is a factor, which it usually is, Idera holds it's own very well and is reasonably priced.
Regards,
Jason P. Burnett
Senior DBA
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