The Complete Integrity Check Solution

Minion CheckDB completes the MinionWare maintenance and backups suite in style. Each solution is plug-and-play for the busy DBA, and deeply configurable for those shops with in-depth needs.

This new module is MinionWare’s most ambitious free release yet, featuring all of the rich scheduling and logging functionality in previous products, plus remote CheckDB, multithreading, custom snapshots, rotational scheduling, and more. 

Meant to Thrill

Minion CheckDB is jam-packed with special features. Our four absolute favorites are:

Multithreading allows you to easily configure Minion CheckDB to run DBCC CheckDB operations on multiple databases in parallel, to run DBCC CheckTable against multiple tables in parallel, or both!

Remote CheckDB – Automatically run DBCC CheckDB remotely for any database. You can even restore your last backup or take a new one as part of the operation. 

Custom Dynamic Snapshots – For CheckTable operations, you can configure “rotating” dynamic snapshots that drop and recreate every few minutes to keep the size of the snapshot down.

Rotational scheduling – Minion CheckDB allows you to define a rotation scenario for your operations. For example, a nightly round of 10 databases would perform integrity checks on 10 databases the first night, another 10 databases the second night, and so on. The rotation can also be based on time and applies to CheckTable as well.

Minion CheckDB Top Features

A few more of the very best features of Minion CheckDB are, in short:

• Dynamic Integrity Check Thresholds – Minion CheckDB allows you to automate whether databases get a DBCC CheckDB operation, or a DBCC CheckTable operation.
• Dynamic Remote CheckDB – Allows you to run CheckDB remotely if your databases grows past a certain size.
• Custom Snapshots – Choose to create a custom snapshot, for versions of SQL Server that support custom snapshots. This allows you to determine where your snapshot file(s) will be located. 
• Operation ordering – Run DBCC CheckDB and CheckTable operations in exactly the order you need.
• Extensive, useful logging – Use the Minion CheckDB log for estimating the end of the current CheckDB run, troubleshooting, planning, and reporting. And errors get reported in the log table instead of in text files. There’s almost nothing MC doesn’t log.
• Run code before or after CheckDBs and CheckTables – This is an extraordinarily flexible feature that allows for nearly infinite configurability.
• Integrated help – Get help on any Minion CheckDB object without leaving Management Studio. And, use the new CloneSettings procedure to generate template insert statements for any table, based on an example row in the table.
• Scenario testing — Test the settings to be used at any given time for any database.
• Automated installation – Run the Minion CheckDB installation scripts, and it just goes. You can even rollout to hundreds of servers almost as easily as you can to a single server.
• Granular configuration without extra jobs – Configure extensive settings at the default, database, and/or table levels with ease. Say good-bye to managing multiple jobs for specialized scenarios. Most of the time you’ll run MC with a single job.
• Live Insight – See what Minion CheckDB is doing every step of the way. You can see the percent complete for each operation as it runs. And it works on remote operations as well.
• Flexible include and exclude – Perform integrity checks on only what you need, using specific database names, LIKE expressions, and even regular expressions. Further restrict operations by including or excluding by schemas and/or tables.
• Inline Tokens – Inline Tokens allow you use defined patterns to create dynamic names. For example, MC comes with the predefined Inline Token “Server” and “DBName”.

Minion CheckDB Webinars

Join us for our MinionWare for a Minion CheckDB webinar on Wednesday February 1 at 12:00pm CT, or Friday February 3 at 12:00pm CT. We’ll walk you through all the best features and answer any questions you have. Go to www.MinionWare.net to download Minion CheckDB, and for webinar information, downloads, documentation, and tutorial videos.