EdVassie (6/10/2013)
There are other ways of tackling this issue, but they do not exist yet for SQL Server.Back in the late 1990's a number DB2 shops stopped taking full backups of their databases. They used functionality in some third-party backup products called 'offline database merge'.
The idea of this way to take an existing full backup, and apply to it either a differential or a log backup, giving you a new full backup. If you applied a log backup, you could choose any point of time in the log that the new full backup should relate to.
One advantage of this aproach is that the merge process could take place away from the database server. If you already had your full backup on an offsite server, you only needed to get your log backup sent there, and you could do the backup merge. The only time this process needed to connect to a database server was to register the new full backup.
IMHO this is a process that vendors of SQL backup products could ad to their product, assuming they can work around any patent issues that may exist. Anyone want to take up this challenge?
Gosh... sounds as simple as "merge replication" or "log shipping".
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.