It's quite common to see automated/custom procedures for backing up a database/log - nearly everywhere I go companies have custom backup procedures and processes to handle backups, logging of backups, naming standards, locations, etc. However, it's rare that I find processes/procedures in place...

This post will cover an initial overview of the data compression feature that will be included in Sql Server 2008, and I'll also cover briefly some information on the Backup Compression feature as well (note that these are 2 totally separate and distinct features, since they are very different, as...

So, here's an interesting scenario I ran into a few weeks back. A customer had a situation in which they were using a read-only database (to serve reports/ad-hoc queries during production hours) that was loaded nightly with differential data from a variety of systems. This data was imported to the...