In the world where laptop prices have dropped to the point
where many developers now get those instead of full PCs, we have become
increasingly mobile. The laptops have become more and more powerful with space
being at a premium. LiteSpeed for SQL Server is a time and space saver for
developers and DBAs that can’t be ignored. The tool compresses database backups
in flight so they occupy in my testing up to 80% less space as well as it
performs much faster. The best part of all, the
Developer Edition of the tool is free to SQLServerCentral.com members for the
next 5 Days!!
To try the software out, I’ve backed up the AdventureWorks
database using the native SQL Server backup mechanism that we all know and
“love” then I tried the same backup and restoration process with LiteSpeed. I
treated my tablet road warrior machine as the target market for the test. The
machine has 1GB of RAM and is a 1.6 gz Centrio running SQL Server 2005 Developer
Edition.
The new SQL Server 2005 AdventureWorks database is about
185 MB on my system including some demo tables. The native backup creating a 165
MB backup from this database or about 9%. The same database with SQL Litespeed
was compressed to 43MB or 74%. The nice thing was I was also able to add a
password to the backup, to encrypt the backup. This is a little known problem in
SQL Server backups that you can technically read the binary data from a backup
in notepad or equivalent tool.
Here are the complete test results:
|
Type of Backup |
Backup Size |
Backup MB / Sec |
Compression |
Restore MB / Sec |
Restore Time |
|
Native Backup |
165.69 MB |
7.1 MB / Sec |
9% |
6.9 MB / Sec |
24.8 seconds |
|
SQL LiteSpeed |
43.94 MB |
12.3 MB / Sec |
74% |
6.7 MB / Sec |
25.34 seconds |
You are provided a very nice tool to walk you through the
backup and restoration process. The tool can schedule your backups using SQL
Server agent also. For hard-core DBAs, everything inside of SQL LiteSpeed can be
scripted using extended stored procedures. You may notice in the results above
that backups are tremendously fast and compression great. The restoration
process is on par or slightly worse than with the native restorations. Backing
up a large 100 GB database saved about 76 GB of hard drive space.
The tool will cost $50 for Developer Edition if you were to
go to Quest and purchase it. However, if you are a SQLServerCentral.com member,
you can
click on this link to receive a free 1-CPU license.
Ratings
I will rate each of the following using a scale from 1 to 5. 5 being
the best and 1 being the worst. Comments are in the last column.
|
Ease of Use |
5.0 |
There was nothing to it. A wizard walks you
through scheduling the backup. If you’re already familiar with
SQL Server backups, you’ll see nothing to learning this. |
|
Feature Set |
5.0 |
For the Developer Edition of LiteSpeed, the
only thing that was held back was the editions that it can be
installed on. |
|
Value |
5.0 |
It’s free for SQLServerCentral.com members
for 2 months. Impossible to get more value than free! |
|
Lack of Bugs |
5.0 |
None found. |
|
Documentation |
5 |
Documentation complete and easy. |
|
Performance |
4.0 |
Backups were fantastic. Restorations were
not any faster than native backups. |
|
Installation |
5.0 |
Easy installation. |
|
Overall |
4.9 |
It’s hard to imagine why a developer or DBA
wouldn’t install this on their workstation. Did I mention it’s
free?! |
|
Download your copy here.
