Manie Verster (1/14/2009)
... I am clearly not as salted with SQL Server as what you are but I use maintenance plans to do my backups and it uses the dbname_yyyymmdd_sequencenumber as file name and I also have a maintenance plan to cleanup old backups so I have little to do in the way of backups. I come in every morning and do some checks on the database to make sure backups is ok etc. Now I suppose you will laugh at me but I have one user database that is about 2 GB in size. I dunno what I'll do with a 700 gb database. ...
I ain't that salty! Haven't even hit 50 yet, though it's disturbingly close. :hehe:
I don't mind maintenance plans for backups, they do those fairly well. I do not like them for DBCCs, and it seems that most of the maintenance plans that I see people want them to do everything. That's fine, as far as it goes, but I want more details. I do full DBCCs every work night on everything (sp_msforeachdb, except for one server) via OSQL and send the results to a text file. I have an aging system to keep the last ten runs. I then pipe the results through Find looking for "errors" and that file is grabbed by a nightly Perl script so that I see a couple of dozen lines of DBCC results rather than thousands of lines. If I see non-zero numbers in that result set, I can probe deeper into the full file that's on the server.
This does two things for me. First, detailed information. As far as I've seen in 2000, maintenance plans don't give detailed results in their logs. Second, I wouldn't have confidence that a maintenance plan would pick up new databases whereas I know sp_msforeachdb will catch everything. But for backups, I guess they'd be OK.
Old habits die hard. I spent my formative years as a DBA in a 4.21/6.5 environment where you did everything by hand. It warn't like them fancy gewgaws and wizards them young kids got now! GET OFF MY LAWN! 😀
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