Backup/restore Questions in Books Online

  • Hi,

    I encountered speed bumps once again while reading the backup/restore question list in Books Online. Could someone clarify what the rationale behind the following questions is:

    • Are some tables modified more often than others?
    • What are your critical database production periods?

    What is a critical database production period and why is it important for backup/restore? Why if a table is modified more often has any significance as far as backup/restore is concerned, i.e. what are the implications for backup/restore? Please clarify. Would highly appreciate it.

    Karim

  • Something like...

    If you have some very important tables  ie Sales, that have frequent inserts/updates then your backup strategy should change, if your database is a bunch of slowly changing tables, the number of Full, Differential, and Log backups will be different.

    Critical periods would be like you have a huge data load every night between 1:00 and 2:00. You may decide to backup before or after, but not during this time.

     

  • Thanks Ray. But I have a question there. In BOL, there is a separate question right after the critical periods question that states the following:

    When does the database experience heavy use, resulting in frequent inserts and updates?

    The two questions can't be talking about the same thing in different ways. Please clarify.

  • Hmmmm... the question was "Are some tables modified more often than others?". I guess this is a hint to the possibility to divide the database into several files/filegroups, with separate backups. It is possible to put frequently updated tables into one file, and the rest of tables into another file. Then you can backup the first file more frequently.

    See "Using File Backups" in BOL.

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