We are now ‘feature complete’ and only have a few weeks until we have code lock off. The beta program has in the region of 75 customers signed up, many of which are actively posting feedback on the private forum. The comments have been encouraging. The beta testers have been carrying out some impressive tests, for example, running overnight backups producing some 12,000 backups files.

This release is a major upgrade and it’ll be exciting to have SQL Backup 4.0 launched in January 2006. Apart from the major features (see the list on my previous post) there are a whole lot more other features worth knowing about. Here’s a taster of what’s to come…

Tagged backup paths

In version 3, you could use tags to name backup files automatically. In version 4, you can now tag backup paths. If the generated path does not exist, SQL Backup will create it as long as the SQL Backup service startup user has the necessary rights.

master..sqlbackup ‘-sql “BACKUP DATABASES [northwind, pubs] TO DISK = [e:backups<database><datetime yyyymmdd><type><auto>]”‘

 EXCLUDE keyword

Use the EXCLUDE keyword to backup up all the databases on a server except a selected list.

master..sqlbackup ‘-SQL “BACKUP DATABASES EXCLUDE [master, msdb, model]  TO DISK = e:backups <AUTO>” “‘

THREADS keyword

In version 3, to script a backup to make use of multiple files you had to name each file individually e.g.

exec master..sqlbackup ‘-sql “BACKUP DATABASE pubs TO DISK = [e:backupspubs_1.sqb], DISK = [e:backupspubs_2.sqb], DISK = [e:backupspubs_3.sqb], DISK = [e:backupspubs_4.sqb] “‘

This will make a backup of the pubs database to 4 files, which indirectly creates 4 threads to perform the task.

In version 4, you can use the new THREADS keyword to automatically create the required number of files e.g.

exec master..sqlbackup ‘-sql “BACKUP DATABASE pubs TO DISK = [e:backupspubs.sqb] WITH THREADS = 4″‘

The generated files will be named

e:backupspubs.sqb
e:backupspubs_2.sqb
e:backupspubs_3.sqb
e:backupspubs_4.sqb