What have you been working on?
- We have been focused on a new product, ApexSQL Backup, for managing SQL Server backups, among other things. Our plan is to release an R1 in a few weeks. We’re wrapping up log shipping code, polishing wizards, doing final updates on installer package and working on general stability/bug-fixes
What problems does ApexSQL Backup solve?
- Backup cross server backup schedules from single location – no need to track each server individually
- Automatically notify when failures occur – no need to check each server individually
- Automatically apply backup policies to new databases – no need to define backup schedules for new databases – default policy is automatically applied
- Create and apply policies – no need to define backup schedule for every single database – simply create the policy and apply it to all desired databases across multiple servers
What is the ETA to production?
- The release is planned for early March
What are some cool features planned in the first release?
Here are some cool features:
- Automatically add a backup plan for new databases – define default server policy and all new databases will follow this schedule unless explicitly defined otherwise without the need to configure new backup schedules when adding a new database
- Support for all backup options including:
- Full, differential, transaction log, copy-only, files and filegroups backups
- Mirroring and split backup files support
- Backup to a network destination
- Native compression and native encryption
- Automatic backup naming schemes (based on a date, type, location…)
- No vendor locking – all backups can be used by our other tools as well: ApexSQL Log, ApexSQL Recover, ApexSQL Restore, ApexSQL Diff, and ApexSQL Data Diff
- Full support for restore scheduling
- Full support for log shipping
- Easy to use GUI
- Email notification when failures occur
What is planned in future releases and what are ETAs?
Big features planned in next releases are:
ApexSQL Backup R2 – ETA May 2015:
- Full SQL cluster support
- Intelligent backup cleanup to preserve a full transaction log chain
- Automatically enforced default policies – both per server and global: default policy will be enforced on any server that doesn’t have a scheduled backup policy
ApexSQL Backup R3 – ETA September 2015:
- Preferred backup period – custom backup scheduling
- Intelligent scheduling – takes into account at what times backups are running and staggers them within the preferred period, where possible, in order to prevent start at the same time
- System databases support
- Post restore script – a custom script that can be executed after a restore
- Restore with copy logins – recreating all SQL logins after restore
- Restore to a different collation
- Cross database job viewer – view all scheduled jobs for all databases
- Insufficient backup space early alerting
- Alert if a backup job took longer in comparison to a regular backup time or if a file size was substantially bigger compared to the common size
- Index defragmentation
February 11, 2015
