Backup Comparison Performance

RBohannon

We are currently running SQL Data Compare 5. We are interested in upgrading to SDC 6 in order to get the backup compare functionality.

Currently our application creates a backup of the production database then restores it to another name. The application then uses SDC 5 to compare the restored copy to a restored backup of yesterday's data to get the differences.

Can you tell me if using SDC 6's ability to compare the backups without restoring them will improve our performance? Or is SDC 6 merely doing some kind of restore behind the scenes, and we won't really see any improvement in our application's performance?

Since we're not doing the restores manually, I'm not sure that using the new feature will gain us anything.

Thank you.

richardjm

No we don't do a restore in the background and in fact don't even need a sql server to compare backups at all. Depending on the size of your database you should see an improvement in performance. I would strongly advise you to always compare on clustered index keys and this is possibly the biggest single effect on performance comparing to backups there is.

The API is available in the SDC6 toolkit. I think I've posted some example code over on my Simple Talk blog

http://www.simple-talk.com/community/bl ... 39528.aspx

Also if you use SQL Backup files that are compressed your application will have less space requirements also.

HTH