April 21, 2008 at 8:39 am
We have to push .bak files from our SAN server to a warm server. Log Shipping, Mirroring and Replication are not an option due to the antiquity of the databases (legacy ERP system)
We are using the command line winzip but it is taking much longer to zip and transfer.
Is there any file compression software available that is better and large files?
April 21, 2008 at 11:25 am
I like 7zip. It's freeware and command line oriented. It handles large files very well.
Hope this helps
Marvin Dillard
Senior Consultant
Claraview Inc
April 21, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Why not use Litespeed to compress the backup files themselves?
April 21, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Thanks I will look at both.....
April 21, 2008 at 3:33 pm
If you are going to look at litespeed, you should also consider RedGate SQL Backup and HyperBac's HyperBac.
😎
April 21, 2008 at 5:36 pm
jsheldon (4/21/2008)
We have to push .bak files from our SAN server to a warm server. Log Shipping, Mirroring and Replication are not an option due to the antiquity of the databases (legacy ERP system)We are using the command line winzip but it is taking much longer to zip and transfer.
Is there any file compression software available that is better and large files?
We use litespeed. I've never used red gate, but I like LiteSpeed.
April 21, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Red Gate has a good product (I work for them), slightly different features than Litespeed, different price point.
Hyperbac is written by the guys that originally wrote Litespeed many years ago.
April 21, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I will say this about Hyperbac, they are a hands on company. I work in Colorado Springs (USA) and Hyperbac is in Melbourne (Australia). I have talked to a couple of people from Hyperbac several times in the past week or so. Both Mohammed and Jeffery were very pleasant to talk to, and having found a minor issue with the configuration manager program (nothing show stopping, just a minor issue), they walked through how I found the error with me, and saw what was wrong. I expect the issue to be resolved about the time our purchase process actually completes and we buy the product.
As a school district, pricing is important as well as performance and reliability. As they also have a product for SharePoint, it works into where we seem to be heading. Until I read about HyperBac in SQL Server Magazine, I had been leaning strongly to Red Gate's SQL Backup, but HyperBac just seems to be a better fit for us and being less expensive is a plus.
😎
April 21, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Hi
I understand your issues around sizes of backup / .BAK files as we too have the same issues.
What we have investigated is which tables in our DB can be "moved" to an archive DB on the same server.
This has helped us to free approx 50GB from the daily backups.
Other options we are still to investigate is filegroups and backing up these filegroups based on dates of the data.
(if these above options are available to you then great - otherwise previous posts provide great software titles to try)
With a smaller .BAK it may be quicker to zip the files and copy them to alternative locations
All the best
Thanks
Kevin
April 22, 2008 at 2:40 am
when talking about archive databases, they probably are an interesting idea, but not really necessary anymore with SQL 2005 because you can use data partitioning in order to move 'old' and probably quite static data in an other filegroup. There you can optimize the indexes once and for all and reduce the amount of wasted free space.
Of course full backups in that case will not be that much smaller, but filegroup based ones will (when you backup the filegroup containing old data once)
April 22, 2008 at 6:36 am
Before I started evaluating HyperBac, I was using PKZip to zip up the DW dtabases (and I still use it at this time on our production PeopleSoft servers). Although PKZip has done a great job, the time it took was quite a while, especially when I look at the backups with HyperBac. The native full backup of DWODS takes over 12 minutes and uses approximately 22 GB. The same backup using HyperBac takes a little over 6 minutes and uses approximately 4 GB (PKZip would use approximately 3 GB).
The restore tests in development were also about 50% faster as well.
I would highly recommend that DBA's consider products like LiteSpeed, SQL Safe, SQL Backup, and HyperBac. I haven't had the opportunity yet to test the backup compression that I have read is available natively in SQL Server 2008. I would like to hear from anyone who has tested this feature.
😎
April 22, 2008 at 7:57 am
Hi
I have done some testing and it is excellent - my test 3.6GB DB was shrunk to only 960MB and it took half the time using SQL 2008.
Obviously this will depend on data types and storage with SQL etc
Thanks
Kevin
April 22, 2008 at 8:24 am
The 2008 compression algorithm seems very good, however it's an Enterprise-Edition only feature. If that works for you, great, but if not, check out the other products.
April 22, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Well, being on a State government project, money always come up and you have to make do with what you have. That's why, with money as an issue, 7Zip is a great compression freeware program. It also can be used across your universe all other types of files.
That being said, if you have funds, I like SQL Safe, when I last used it about a year ago (different project). It had great compression and speed of backup and ease of use...outstanding.
But back to being in the no money environment. you can't beat free
Marvin Dillard
Senior Consultant
Claraview Inc
April 22, 2008 at 1:05 pm
On the free side, we are using gzip. It works well also. we are using it to zip text files prior to being ftp'ed to a MSP.
😎
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 34 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply