April 4, 2004 at 7:04 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/b
Bruce Szabo, MCSE+I, MCDBA, MCSD
April 8, 2004 at 6:37 am
The managment of DTS packages to various servers and to structured files can be done by going to sqldts.com and downloading the DTS2000Backup program.
It does it all, and it's free, too!!
April 8, 2004 at 11:54 am
This is all a waist of time. Nothing will or can ever take the place of backing up to tape. This functionality should be happening no matter what. One should never directly edit a DTS Package used on a Production(LIVE) Server. A test version of that package should be created on a Development Server and then promoted or copied up to the Production Server. In this scenario there is no need to go through all of the steps you outline here. Your main store now is your Development Server, where all of the main work has been done. If you really feel you need the extra security of saving the DTS package elsewhere (besides tape), you can save the file from your Development Server to a *.bas or *.dts. This will allow you to open your package on any server and can be saved in a change management software application like Source Safe. This would be my recomended process. Keep in mind that it is never recommended to make modifications, structure or DATA, to any of the sys tables.
April 8, 2004 at 6:44 pm
Hi Douglas,
Thanks for the reply. I agree with you in some cases but how many servers are you managing? In a single server environment I think your points are well taken and these steps are a waste of time. In a production environment you would be backing up the MSDB and should have a copy of all this information. I mentioned this in the first article.
In the case where you have a lot of servers, coordinating the backup of all the MSDBs could be time consuming. From a developer standpoint when I have packages on a bunch of development servers I found my method rather convenient. I was able to collect the latest version of packages and put them in a database. I tried saving as *.dts files but it was a lot of work to gather the 10 to 12 packages off 3 different servers.
I also looked into the SQL2000backup mentioned in the other post but I found it to be single server based but to be honest I hadn't looked at it in a while.
I know how busy most DBAs are so I would hate to waste anyone's time but hopefully the article allows one to get ideas on how to attack problems using alternate methods.
Bruce Szabo, MCSE+I, MCDBA, MCSD
April 11, 2004 at 4:40 pm
I liked the article. Not always you see an approach that fits a multi server environment.
January 28, 2005 at 7:30 am
Don't think it was a "waist" (sic) of time at all. If you can guarantee in a multi-developer situation that nobody has tinkered with at DTS package on a live server, then the approach of visual source safe and development servers is fine. But having the actual DTS packages from the live production server backed up gives an added level of comfort, in my opinion.
January 28, 2005 at 5:14 pm
I am still amazed at how well this process has served me. It also makes it easy to keep a copy of all my DTS pacakges from various places without have to have copies of MSDB.
Bruce
Bruce Szabo, MCSE+I, MCDBA, MCSD
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