Looking to use LiteSpeed for SQL Server for Log Shipping?  Check out this video, created by Nina Philippova our lead technical writer for LiteSpeed, for a step-by-step overview of configuring a Log Ship plan through the LiteSpeed UI.  Please provide any feedback that you may have, we’d love to hear it.  Thanks!

Continuing a string of posts on tips and tricks for LiteSpeed, I thought I would take an opportunity to discuss how LiteSpeed allows you to select databases to backup in a maintenance plan.  Whether or not to use maintenance plans to backup your SQL Servers is very much a matter of personal preference.  LiteSpeed has added some great functionality to make maintenance plans more configurable than what you get with SQL Server.

Consider the screen that allows you to select which databases to backup.  In SSMS 2008 (and 2005/2000) you can select to backup either all databases, all system DB’s, all user DB’s, or you can select a subset of your DB’s to backup with an associated plan.

Native Database Selector

There are two main challenges with manually selecting a subset of your databases.

1. Once you select a subset of your databases, any new database added to the system will not be automatically picked up by the maintenance plan.
2. The order in which the databases are backed up is not configurable.  The critically of your databases is not determined alphabetically, and if you have a maintenance plan run long, wouldn’t you want your most important databases backed up first?

LiteSpeed Maintenance Plans have addressed these two concerns.  In the database selector for a LiteSpeed maintenance plan, you have two options that you don’t get with native plans.

1. LiteSpeed lets you select databases for exclusion (not inclusion as in a native plan).  Essentially, you are telling LiteSpeed to backup all databases except the chosen databases.  This means that any newly created databases will be picked up by your plan, yet you can define databases that should never be backed up.
2. You can order the databases that you select.  By moving databases up and down you can determine which databases get backed up first.  I highly recommend that you let your maintenance plan tackle the most critical databases first so that should anything occur during your maintenance window, your most critical databases have a higher probability of completing successfully.

LiteSpeed Database Selector

In the example above, master and msdb are backed up first, followed by the Quest repositories, followed by the remainder of my databases.

As you can see, not only does LiteSpeed compress and/or encrypt your database backups, but also has functionality built in to assist with the management of your backups as well.  Plenty more tips and tricks to come.  If you have any questions about this or anything else, feel free to comment or visit the forums.

One question that comes up quite a bit pertains to how you can handle errors generated by the LiteSpeed Extended Stored Procedures (XP’s) in your own custom scripts.  Scripting with XP’s is fairly straight forward, because they accept parameters just like any other stored proc, but how they handle errors is a bit different.  Unlike  standard SQL Statements that will populate @@error and can be handled with TRY/CATCH blocks, XP’s simply return an error code.  By capturing the value returned by an XP you can succesfully trap and code around many types of errors.  View the following block of code to show how this is done.  In this example, the drive I am trying to backup to does not exist, therefore the backup fails with error code 50003.

DECLARE @rc INT
EXEC @rc = master.dbo.xp_backup_database
  @DATABASE='master'
  ,@filename ='V:\backup\database.BKP';
SELECT @rc

I know some folks out there have done some pretty cool things scripting with LiteSpeed.  If anyone has any scripts they’d like to share, we’d love to take a look!!

Microsoft SharePoint content databases are notoriously difficult to compress.  Users upload Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations into the SharePoint sites, and these bulky files go straight into the SQL Server database.  They’re tough to compress, and the files just keep piling up as more users start using the company intranet.

Even worse, us database administrators are told that SharePoint is now mission-critical, and we have to make sure we back it up as fast and as often as possible.  How do we do it?  In this five-minute video, Brent Ozar shows how to use LiteSpeed’s new FastCompression to pull it off.

When an issue occurs during your backup and recovery process such as performance spikes, it is extremely beneficial to get as clear a picture as possible of what activities are occurring in your SQL Server environment.  LiteSpeed for SQL Server offers this clarity by logging these activities for immediate analysis and isolation of any bottlenecks.  This video takes you through the process of enabling logging through the LiteSpeed for SQL Server console and will cover four different areas within the product.

• Backup Wizard
• Restore Wizard
• Maintanance Plans
• Console Logging

Special thanks to April Bucher on the LiteSpeed QA team for putting this short video together. 

Say 'hello' to my little friend!

We’re very excited to introduce a new addition to LiteSpeed brand – we’ve released LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server, which is now available with LiteSpeed for SQL Server Enterprise.  Let’s nail some questions that you may be having:

• What is LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server?  It’s a very light weight, drop and go compression and encryption ‘engine’ for SQL Server.

• Why is that important?  By offering LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server, customers who already have a backup and recovery strategy in place using their own scripts and processes can now get the compression and encryption that is offered by LiteSpeed – without changing their current backup processes.

• What’s the difference between LiteSpeed Engine and LiteSpeed Enterprise?  LiteSpeed for SQL Server Enterprise offers the full monty – a very comprehensive backup and recovery solution that provides not just compression and encryption, but also Maintenance Plan management, Object level recovery, Fast Compression, etc.  Now, LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server, as stated in the previous bullet, simply offers the compression and encryption capabilities of LiteSpeed which fits into an already established backup and recovery process.

• Can you give a brief usecase for this?  LiteSpeed Engine provides much more flexibility and choice to you as to how to deploy LiteSpeed.  For example, on your ‘mission/business critical’ systems, the full implementation of a backup and recovery strategy offered by LiteSpeed Enterprise will be very valuable.  On those less critical systems, or pre-production environments, or those databases that already have a backup and recovery plan in place, LiteSpeed Engine will be the missing piece that gives compression and encryption.

• How do I get LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server?  Currently, LiteSpeed Engine is available to evaluate by downloading from our LiteSpeed for SQL Server page on Quest.com.  Take a look – we’d love your feedback.

• Is there any other resource where we can see how LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server will work?  Yes!  We have a brief video that provides an overview of LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server and how to configure.

We’re really excited about our introduction of LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server and are confident that the flexibility now available in how you decide LiteSpeed fits into your backup and recovery strategy will blow you away.

Quest’s new LiteSpeed Engine for SQL Server is a transparent way to compress and encrypt your Microsoft SQL Server backups – without changing your existing backup scripts or maintenance plans.  Instead of calling special stored procedures at backup time, just configure the Engine once and be done with it.  Learn how to set it and forget it in this video by Brent Ozar.

I read a post recently on The Grateful DBA that describes his analysis in testing different compression levels in LiteSpeed for SQL Server and their impact on both backup size and efficiency.  In his own words this is a “non-scientific, ground-level look at LiteSpeed’s compression ratios”, but I think this approach is a real world approach.  The post describes the pros and cons of higher vs. lower compression levels and where each is appropriate depending on the database environment.  There’s good food for thought in the blog entry and there’s  a pretty graph!  Mmm…food for thought and pretty graph….

Anyway, again, I just waned to repost the blog entry and invite discussion.  Here’s the link again:  http://troygallant.com/?p=155  -  thank you Grateful DBA.

Have a great weekend everybody and good luck getting your last minute Christmas  shopping out of the way.

When it absolutely, positively has to be backed up, don’t just rely on one backup file.  Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server can write database backups simultaneously to two places.  This protects DBAs from other users accidentally deleting backup files, from crashed file servers, and from corrupted tapes.  Learn how to mirror your LiteSpeed backups in this video by Brent Ozar:

Need to send a SQL Server backup to someone, but it’s too big and you’re not sure if they use LiteSpeed?  Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server can back up databases into a single executable file.  You can send that file to someone else or copy it to another server, and that other server doesn’t need LiteSpeed.  The person doing the restore doesn’t even have to understand how SQL Server works – LiteSpeed takes care of all the details.

In this video, Brent Ozar shows how both the backup and restore process works: