I suppose its personal
preference.
I prefer using agents
because:
1. It avoids a two stage recovery if your backup is not
on local disk.
2. It puts more control and understanding in the hands
of the backup administrator (and more work
unfortunately)
3. It avoids scheduling issues - so you don’t start
backing up to NetBackup before sql has finished dumping the data (although I
suppose you could also get around this using a scripted
approach)
4. lighter on client resources - you don’t have to dump
the database and then still have to read it into
NetBackup
5. In a large DB environment you can save on storage
costs by not having to allocate db dump areas
6. If the DB server is not a media server you can still
get pretty good performance, perhaps even better than reading off and writing to
direct attached disk, while GigE NW and Jumbo
frames
The downside is the extra training and as someone
pointed out the finger pointing between DBA and backup admins - and of course
the cost of the agent
From:
veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Bryan Bahnmiller
Sent: 23 October 2009 20:11
To: Wilcox, Donald A (GE,
Research)
Cc:
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] MS SQL
Agents
Don,
It entirely depends on
your priorities.
If you can't
afford the cost of the agent, well, that's one way to do it. Although you better
be figuring in the total ownership cost of 3X the disk space of having your live
db and 2 backup copies online. That is not cheap either.
I've always heard the
DBA argument that we always want to have fast access to the disk for restores. I
can't rebut the argument that the disk is more highly available than the backup
system. However, I can say a SQL server backup to local disk, or restore from
local disk, using native SQLserver tools has never been as fast as the NetBackup
agent backup - that I have ever seen. Not that it is impossible, but in my years
I haven't seen it.
Also, if you have to go
further back for a restore than what you have on disk, it is going to take you
several times longer with more potential for errors - restore backup to disk,
then restore the db from the disk restore.
One more thing I'll say
for the NetBackup SQL agent (or Oracle too.) Once I have introduced DBA's to the
agent, demonstrated how the agent works, how the DBA's can now completely manage
their own backups and restores, they have never gone back.
Bryan
All,
I am currently
looking for info on backing up MS SQL boxes and wondered if the agent actually
does any type of snapshotting or are there scripts that have to pause the
database and then the backup begins? We currently have local scripts in
place that put the database in a mainteneance mode and copies data to a data
directory. Then the script starts up the database and our Netbackup server
comes in and does a regular backup of the box, which includes the data
directory. Why would I spend money for an agent when we get backups with
this method?
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