SQL Server 2008 provides a feature, which, in my opinion, has been far overdue -- backup compression. For too long, if you wanted the benefit of compressed backups, you had to look at a third-party tool. Now, backup compression is built right into SQL Server 2008, and what's even better is that it's easy to use. All you have to do is append the ...

Because of the problems I had removing Data Collector I decided to rebuild msdb. You probably heard about instmsdb.sql, but it was a long time since I actually used it. I asked about rebuilding in the MVP group and Dan Jones (MS) pointed me to a Blog post from Paul Randal on how to do this on SQL Server 2005. Here's Paul's blog ...

Having a few moments to spare, I decided to give this a spin. Specifying for the backup to be compressed is really simple. Just specify COMPRESSION in the WITH clause of the BACKUP command. For example: BACKUP DATABASE Adventureworks  TO DISK = 'C:\Advc.bak'  WITH INIT, COMPRESSION For fun, I ...