Go get 'em Steve !

I'm sick of the rantings about my rantings!  

Over the past two days, there have been some comments posted in forums about Red Gate Software's licensing agreement for SQL Backup. The clause in the license agreement referred to in these posts is designed to prevent the use of a single license on multiple machines by continually transferring the license between machines. We can see, however, that the wording of the license can be interpreted in a different, more sinister way. It was never intended to stop people from transferring licenses in the case of upgrades, replacement of old equipment, reorganization, or any other legitimate reason, and we apologize if customers or prospective customers interpreted it this way.

I believe that any customer who does business with Red Gate Software knows that we operate in an atmosphere of trust and respect. We are working now on changing our licensing terms to make our policies clear. In the meantime, if anybody is concerned about this issue, please contact me directly at nick.warren@red-gate.com.

While we welcome competitive comparisons of products in open forums, the recent postings regarding our licensing issues seem to carry another purpose: to spread unwarranted fear and alarm in an effort to undermine Red Gate's credibility. We do not think that this is the purpose of forums, and we will not engage in these types of exchanges.

As for the suitability of SQL Backup in an enterprise environment, nearly 4000 customers -- including many Fortune 500 companies -- have selected Red Gate's product as the best choice for critical backup needs. We invite you to compare our products to our competitors in an environment of full disclosure, and send your comments to us, or post them on public forums, where we will be glad to respond.

Nick Warren

Head of Customer Support, Red Gate Software

I've used both Litespeed (for about 2 1/2 years) and now SQL Backup for about 7 months.  Overall, both products do the job intended and do it well.

Litespeed has the ability to replace the built in commands of SQL Server so that if you issue the standard backup commands (like using their Maintenance Plans for backups) - you will still be able to take advantage of the compression/encryption.

Both have standalone decompressors, so you can decompress/decrypt a backup on a machine that doesn't have the software installed in order to restore your DB.

SQL Backup does have a Lite version that will allow you to decompress/decrypt the backups from their Pro version - when last I used Litespeed - they did not have this ability - it may have changed now.  This option is great because you can get a lesser version for your developers so that they can restore the DB locally for their own work - without having to have as much space as the full decompressed backup would require.  Plus it's a LOT faster to restore the compressed object, rather than the decompressed object.

I think that SQL Backup does perform better in both compression and encryption time than Litespeed does.  With a big database (mines rather small at 40GB) the faster the better - I get my backup down to about 7gb compressed/encrypted.

I think given all of the issues with people losing hard drives with sensitive information, it's only going to be a matter of time that we hear of some ISP losing a set of backup tapes with companies data on it.  Having it encrypted gives me a little insurance against this happening.  Not to mention the space savings in both backups and that I can now keep a weeks worth of backups on a local drive in case of a failure.

In my own experience, Red-Gate's support staff is more responsive and I got answers/feedback much more quickly from them (even on their forums) than I did with Quest.

Both are good companies and they stand behind their products, so I don't think you'll lose in going with either one.

Bill

I think most of you all need to get a life .  For crying out loud, does anyone really expect a free lunch?  If you aren't mature or informed enough to know how the world works, you don't deserve the rich, informative, and highly valuable information that is being provided to you, the end-user, for FREE!!!

In full-disclosure, I'm just a poor shmoe trying to get by using my SQL skills and always needing to learn from experts in the field.

Thanks for the continuing great newsletters (to Steve, Andy, Red-Gate,... heck, whoever funds it and delivers the info.  Does it matter?)

Hugh

Thanks, Bill, for your honest appraisal of  SQL Backup and Litespeed. Both are capable of completing backup activities quickly and accurately, and they certainly enable DBAs to work far beyond the capabilities of native SQL Server for backup tasks.

As Project Manager of SQL Backup at Red Gate Software, of course I’m proud of the consistently high performance of SQL Backup and all its features. It’s no secret, though, that SQL Backup has features that Litespeed does not have, and vice-versa. This kind of variation between tools is natural in such a competitive market, and I agree with Bill that DBAs cannot really go far wrong with either solution. I would strongly recommend that everyone tries out both SQL Backup and Litespeed in their own environments to see which tool is most suited to their circumstances, working practices and budget. By the way, we’re always happy to answer any questions or hear feedback about SQL Backup, so do get in touch, either with our toll-free numbers or email addresses, as shown on the Red Gate website or through the forums here and we’ll be pleased to help!

Helen Joyce