Improved #MinionBackup and #MinionReindex – new versions!

We released Minion Backup 1.1 and Minion Reindex 1.2 this week! We’ve got a some great new features, and a number of bug fixes.

New features in brief: Minion Backup can now back up to NUL. Minion Reindex has improved error trapping and logging, and new statement prefix and suffix options!

minion backupMinion Backup 1.1

The one page MB Highlights PDF is a good place to start, if you haven’t laid hands on our backup solution yet. That’s just

New feature: You can now take NUL backups, so you can kick start your backup tuning scenario.  For more information, see the section titled “About: Backing up to NUL”in the official product documentation on www.MinionWare.net/Backup/

 Issues resolved:

  • Fixed mixed collation issues.
  • Fixed issue where Verify was being called regardless of whether there were files that needed verifying.
  • Data Waiter port wasn’t being configured correctly so there were circumstances where the data wasn’t being shipped to the other servers.
  • Greatly enhanced Data Waiter performance. Originally, if a server were down, the rows would be errored out and saved to try for the next execution.  Each row would have to timeout.  If the server stayed offline for an extended period you could accumulate a lot of error rows waiting to be pushed and since they all timed out, the job time began to increase exponentially.  Now, the server connection is tried once, and if the server is still down then all of the rows are instantly errored out.  Therefore, there is only one timeout incurred for each server that’s down, instead of one timeout for each row.  This greatly stabilizes your job times when you have sync servers that are offline.
  • Fixed an issue where the ‘Missing’ parameter wasn’t being handled properly in some circumstances.
  • Fixed issue where Master was discarding differential backups in simple mode.
  • Fixed issue where Master wasn’t displaying DBs in proper order. They were being run in the proper order, but the query that shows what ran wasn’t sorting.
  • Master SP wasn’t handling Daily schedules properly.
  • Reduce DNS lookups by using ‘.’ when connecting to the local box instead of the machine name which causes a DNS lookup and could overload a DNS server.
  • SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 service consideration. The DMV sys.dm_server_services didn’t show up until R2 SP1.  The Master SP only checked for 10.5 when querying this DMV.  If a server is 10.5 under SP1, then this fails because the DMV isn’t there.  Now we check the full version number so this shouldn’t happen again.
  • Master SP not logging error when a schedule can’t be chosen.
  • Situation where differentials will be errored out if they don’t have a base backup. Now they’ll just be removed from the list.
  • HeaderOnly data not getting populated on 2014 CU1 and above. MS added 3 columns to the result set so we had to update for this.
  • Increased shrinkLog variable sizes to accommodate a large number of files.
  • Fixed international language issue with decimals.
  • Push to Minion error handling improved. There were some errors being generated that ended SP execution, but those errors weren’t being pushed to the Minion repository.

More resources:

Minion Reindex 1.2minion reindex-02

If you’re new to Minion Reindex, take a look at the one page MR Highlights PDF to get an idea of what we’ve done with a “simple little index maintenance routine”.

New features:

  • Error trapping and logging is improved. Minion Reindex is able to capture many more error situations now, and they all appear in the log table (Minion.IndexMaintLog).
  • Statement Prefix – All of the Settings tables (Minion.IndexSettingsDB, Minion.IndexSettingsTable) now have a StmtPrefix column. See the documentation on www.MinionWare.net/Reindex/ for details. Note: To ensure that your statements run properly, you must end the code in this column with a semicolon.
  • Statement Suffix – All of the Settings tables (Minion.IndexSettingsDB, Minion.IndexSettingsTable) now have a StmtSuffix column.  See the documentation on www.MinionWare.net/Reindex/ for details. Note: To ensure that your statements run properly, you must end the code in this column with a semicolon.

Issues resolved:

  • Fix: Minion Reindex failed when running on BIN collation.
  • Fix: Help didn’t install if Minion Backup was installed.
  • Fix: Minion Reindex didn’t handle XML and reorganize properly.
  • Fix: ONLINE/OFFLINE modes were not being handled properly.
  • Fix: XML indexes were put into ONLINE mode instead of OFFLINE mode.
  • Fix: Situation where indexes could be processed more than once.
  • Update: Increased Status column in log tables to varchar(max).
  • Fix: Status variable in stored procedures had different sizes.
  • Fix: Wrong syntax created for Wait_at_low_priority option.
  • Fix: Reports that offline indexes were failing when it’s set to online instead of doing it offline.

More resources:

1 thought on “Improved #MinionBackup and #MinionReindex – new versions!

  1. Pingback: Improved #MinionBackup and #MinionReindex – new versions! – DBA Brasil

Comments are closed.