June 16, 2004 at 11:42 am
I just got a quote from a vendor for a third party tool (a very famous one for backup and restore).
To outfit our 12 production servers will cost nearly $36,000.
I already know I have no chance of getting a budget for that, or even half that.
I did manage to get Spotlight on the budget, but now that I look at all the wonderful tools that I would love to have (DB artisan, ErWin or ER Studio, LiteSpeed, etc.) who can get a budget for them?
This is the second place I have worked as the primary dba. Are the places I have worked been very cheap or do most places not have may SQL Server 3rd party tools?
June 16, 2004 at 11:47 am
I've found that a lot of places are cheap, however they seem to be a little better if you can show a real Return On Investment (ROI). For example I just managed to get authorised a PO for litespeed.
Due to the nature of the product (smaller faster backups meaning less cpu time used and less disk space used leading to more capacity available on the backup tapes, more disk space available for db growth) I was able to justify the cost as the ROI would be met in under 6 months.
Certain things are critical, others not so much. ErWin you'll have a lot of trouble persuading people as if you have visio you can do pretty much the same thing (version dependant).
I've tried to push for a couple more tools, but had no luck. I think it's a situation of pick your battles for those apps that are most critical to you and your organisation.
June 16, 2004 at 2:47 pm
Just don't do it! Unless you really have to.
Nothing works better for backup and recovery than using the SQL Server commands.
I backup my databases to hard drive and then use other software (Veritas in my case) to copy the backup files to tape.
We are considering buying extra hard drives to use JUST for storing the backup files.
With backing up to disk, you can use less expensive methods of backing up to tape. I believe Windows has a built in backup method (NTBackup???). Also, most tape devices come with software to make backups. If you are just copying the backup files SQL Server makes, then you don't need expensive agents/options to do the backup.
-SQLBill
June 17, 2004 at 7:52 am
We recently switched all are servers to use SQL Lightspeed for backup and restore. The main reason we did this was for compression. It was taking to long for our centrialized tape backup system to move uncompressed data accross the network and then do the hardware based compression on the tape drives. We average about 80% compression. SQL Lightspeed now has a client application that allows you to manage the backups from your workstation and has a very similar look and feel to Enterprise Manager. Hopefully Yukon will have compression capabilities built in.
June 17, 2004 at 9:34 am
SQL Server has a pretty good set of supplied tools. You probably don't need to spend money on lots of additional software unless you have a specific need.
Other DBMS (esp. DB2 in my experience) really benefit from having something like ERwin or DBArtisan to help generate conversion scripts.
ERwin in particular is a godsend in dev/test environments and when you have to write conversion scripts. Its forward and reverse engineering / script generation capability for a range of DBMS is where the value lies. Comparing it to Visio is a little rough. You've wasted a lot of money if you only use ERwin for drawing datamodels.
I love DBArtisan. I used it with Sybase a few years back and it got us out of all sorts of holes. The quotes I got a year or so ago though pushed it out of reach because it was charged per seat, per DBMS. If you just need one copy and only need it for SQL Server it might be more affordable.
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