Thomas Rushton builds a nasty query to answer an important question:
Assumptions
- Backup jobs that do full backups don’t overlap
- There’s nothing else doing full backups
- erm…
- that’s it
The reason I was thinking about this is that we have occasional-but-annoyingly-frequent backup job failures, wherein most of the databases back up just fine, but the odd one fails. (SharePoint box, I’m looking at you…) Rather than trawling through the error logs to find out which particular database didn’t back up successfully, I wanted a query to do the heavy lifting. Yes, I’m a lazy lone DBA…
The end result is a pivoted query showing days in which full backups fail. There’s a lot of information in there, so that might be something I’d want to visualize in Excel or R, changing cell colors for failed jobs so they stand out better. Nevertheless, check this out, especially if you don’t have a solution in place to monitor backups.