Database Choices

I decided to choose Veritas as my choice for researching and my paper this week because we have used it in the past at my company. I would also like to include a small section on our current backup solution. It is a product called DoubleTake.

First, I was disappointed to learn that Veritas has been bought out by Symantec. I have mixed feelings about Symantec, and they get worse each year. There was a time when Symantec made available solid software. Norton Anti-Virus was on that list as was Norton Utilities. It seems that today though, that both of those products have so much bloat and extra code in them that they rarely work as intended with any given system. Added to that is the fact that both products can be difficult to remove. I fear that the Veritas line of products will go the same way as the above programs.

That said, after doing a bit of research, I find that Veritas has a variety of software. Data protection, automation, performance management, security and availability assurance products are on the list. I will focus specifically on the list of Veritas products for SQL Server. An introduction can be found at:

http://www.veritas.com/solutions/sqlserver.html

There are a list of products Veritas makes for the SQL Server platform. Storage management, application performance and data protection are listed. Under the data protection list, there are three applications:

- NetBackup for Microsoft SQL Server

- Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft SQL Server

- Cluster Server

NetBackup allows for the backup and recovery of SQL servers. It has the ability to include differential backups, SQL Server filegroups, transaction logs and the ability to backup read-only data. It claims to recover data faster by only recovering damaged pages rather than a full recovery. It can recover a database to a specific point in the past or location in the transaction log. It can create copies of it’s backups for archiving at an off-site location and offers a “granular” view of the specific database object properties.

Backup Exec Agent is a similar product, but interacts primarily with SQL users. It can backup individual databases or the entire server and can restore data from both the last