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.

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. 

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:

Are you the kind of database administrator who likes to get under the hood and tweak settings for CPU affinity masking, throttling, transfer sizes, and more?  This video is for you.

Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server has advanced configuration options that will let you finely tune how much power LiteSpeed uses, and on which processors.  Learn how in this video by Brent Ozar:

Quest LiteSpeed for SQL Server can read transaction log files (LDFs), transaction backups (TRNs) and the online transaction log – including transactions that haven’t even been backed up yet.  Learn how in this video by Brent Ozar:

Toad for SQL Server also has this transaction log reader built-in, too!

Hello! As the new PM for LiteSpeed for SQL Server, I’m extremely happy to be here on this blog. While I catch up on all things backup and recovery for SQL Server, one thing has become clear. DBA’s don’t seem to like doing differential backups. From what I gather from numerous customer calls, it seems that the current process for establishing a backup process that includes diff’s and then ensuring these diff’s work according to the predefined schedule and escalation rules is a huge pain in the a**. Well, that’s actually great to hear, believe it or not. Why? Because our advanced compression technology for managing differentials fully automates the process of performing diff’s and enforces contingencies for the differential process so that both size and dates of diff’s have an impact on when the next full will take place. We’ll be providing much more around this advanced compression as we just released 5.1.1 and are hard at work on 5.2.
Thanks! Andy Grant