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. 

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.

Today we went RTM with our latest version of LiteSpeed for SQL Server (5.2) and we’ll be going GA with this at the PASS show in Seattle, WA the week of Nov. 2.

We’re really excited about this release as it beefs up our already strong Fast Compression functionality. Fast Compression further reduces the size of backups by only backing up changed data. This improves backup times and lowers storage requirements by 70% or more over and above your current backup and compression strategy.

Again, we look forward to making it generally available during the PASS show and if you’re headed there, please stop by the booth to say hello and see a demo.  See you there!

Andy