SQL Server Blog

We use Quest’s SQL LiteSpeed in our environment and its a fantastic tool.

I initially started off using the maintenance plans which look very similar to the maintenance plan designer that you will be used to in SQL Server 2005. It was a very basic plan consisting only of a full backup of all databases and then delete any backups over 1 day old.

However, we would occasionally run out of disk space before the backups completed which meant some manual backups and deletions the following morning. This is where you you may ask me why I didn’t just run the delete process before I took the backups. Well, call it paranoia, but I prefer to have a full backup in place before I delete the old one.

In the end, I decided on a single scheduled job. Within the job, I would have two steps for each database. The first step would be to backup the database and the second to delete any backups over 3 days.

To do this, I use the extended procedure xp_slssqlmaint. The full syntax would be:

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_slssqlmaint N’-MAINTDEL -DELFOLDER “S:\MSSQL\Backups\master” -DELEXTENSION “BAK” -DELUNIT “3″ -DELUNITTYPE “days” -DELUSAGE’

Well, as the title reads, I am working from home today – Yes, it is a Saturday and I should be out on the golf course (in an ideal world).

Working on a few things this weekend on our hosted environment. Firstly, moving some of ours clients to dedicated drives, altering fill factors across the board and finally moving a few clients to the alternate server (we run an active/active cluster with our client split into regions (US/Europe)).

I’ve been reading blogs for quite some time now and decided I’d jump on the bandwagon and do one myself. There is so much good content out there and hopefully, I’ll be able to add to that.

This blog will just be about my thoughts on various aspects of SQL Server, interesting things I find out in my day to day job and any other ramblings!

Hopefully you’ll find this blog an interesting read and I look forward to any comments that you may submit!