SQL Server Automated Backups

backupdatabasesql-server-2008

What are the recommendations of software products for creating automated backups of SQL Server 2008 databases?

The backup should happen without taking the database offline/detatching.

Best Solution

If you are using SQL Server Express, you won't find a UI to run periodic backups.
In this case you have to run a batch using Windows Scheduled Tasks or something similar.

Don't forget to use a user with enough privileges to access SQL Server.

In the batch file

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\SQLCMD.EXE" -S 
(local)\SQLExpress -i D:\dbbackups\SQLExpressBackups.sql

In SQLExpressBackups.sql

BACKUP DATABASE MyDataBase1 TO  DISK = N'D:\DBbackups\MyDataBase1.bak' 
WITH NOFORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'MyDataBase1 Backup', SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD,  STATS = 10

BACKUP DATABASE MyDataBase2 TO  DISK = N'D:\DBbackups\MyDataBase2.bak' 
WITH NOFORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'MyDataBase2 Backup', SKIP, NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD,  STATS = 10

GO

Related Solutions

Mysql – How to select the nth row in a SQL database table

There are ways of doing this in optional parts of the standard, but a lot of databases support their own way of doing it.

A really good site that talks about this and other things is http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#select-limit.

Basically, PostgreSQL and MySQL supports the non-standard:

SELECT...
LIMIT y OFFSET x

Oracle, DB2 and MSSQL supports the standard windowing functions:

SELECT * FROM (
  SELECT
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY key ASC) AS rownumber,
    columns
  FROM tablename
) AS foo
WHERE rownumber <= n

(which I just copied from the site linked above since I never use those DBs)

Update: As of PostgreSQL 8.4 the standard windowing functions are supported, so expect the second example to work for PostgreSQL as well.

Update: SQLite added window functions support in version 3.25.0 on 2018-09-15 so both forms also work in SQLite.

Sql – Insert into … values ( SELECT … FROM … )

Try:

INSERT INTO table1 ( column1 )
SELECT  col1
FROM    table2

This is standard ANSI SQL and should work on any DBMS

It definitely works for:

Oracle
MS SQL Server
MySQL
Postgres
SQLite v3
Teradata
DB2
Sybase
Vertica
HSQLDB
H2
AWS RedShift
SAP HANA
Google Spanner