Given our spree of rolling out new features in a timely fashion for all the products, I’m really excited to write in this blog about another one in the making – MS SQL Table Level Recovery. This feature will be available to our backup service users in our next update.
Components of SQL Server
As MS fans (and Linux lads, as well) would probably know, Microsoft SQL server is a relational database that is used to store any type of complex dataset. SQL server’s inbuilt features will meet a lot of business IT needs as it’s designed for both the enterprise and SMB environment. We can split SQL server into two major components: “relational database” and “management system”. The former is well understood while the latter is used to manage and administer the database server. In SQL database, data is stored in tables consisting of columns and rows. Microsoft SQL Server stores default data file types in various directories on the respective computer. Master Database Files (MDF) and Log Database Files (LDF) are the primary files created for each database in the SQL Server environment.
Table Level Restore
The SQL administrator is tasked to maintain all the databases and is required to back it up and restore them in as fast, easy and methodical manner as possible. For precisely this purpose, the administrator can choose to deploy the Vembu BDR product which will enable them to intuitively and easily backup their entire SQL server environment and flexibly perform a restore of the database at any level. The next update will have the option to perform a “Table Level Restore” which will help users to restore database object like tables, views, stored procedures and more. This restore can be done directly from database files called (.mdf & .ldf) which is located in any source location like disk image (.vhd), virtual machine’s or any other third party backup software or in a remote MS-SQL server. But make sure that the two database files are in raw format (uncompressed and unencrypted).
Export objects with Vembu BDR
You can use Vembu BDR to simplify the restore of SQL database without affecting the production server. Lets say that you have configured the disk image backup or you have the db files (.ldf and .mdf) and you want to see the table entries inside the database. We have a solution whereby user has to decide whether to export database objects to the local drive or to restore directly to the destination MS-SQL Server. If user wants to export the database object in an file format, user has to select options “Export as a file ” or else they can opt for “Restore to SQL server” in case of direct MS-SQL server restore. After selecting the option “Export as a file”, it will give 3 types of file formats that you can restore as: 1) Export object schema. 2) Export object data. 3) Export SQL query result. Vembu BDR easily and flexibly allows the SQL administrator to see what columns and table entries are available in the particular SQL database and in addition, you can also view the tables without sql server installed in the machine. Once you have selected the “Export object schema”, you can find two options in the next step, namely, “Export as .sql (supported with sql) or .xls format (supported with Excel)” and you can leverage this to perform any query analysis’s to optimize the execution time. Hope this feature coverage was useful and informative to you. The best thing is to just try it out and we promise that you wont have to wait much longer for this update !
