• New installer! The new MB 1.3 installer comes with Minion CheckDB 1.0. Choose to install one, the other, or both, and on multiple servers!
• Increased international support
• Inline Tokens
• Enhanced restore functionality
• Minion.BackupRestoreSettingsPath – This table stores the path settings for restore scenarios. In other words, here is where you define the paths and file names the system will restore to.
• Minion.BackupRestoreTuningThresholds – This table holds thresholds used to determine when to change the tuning of a restore; and the tuning settings per threshold.
• New fields in Minion.BackupSettingsPath – Minion.BackupSettingsPath now has new fields that let you specify FileName and FileExtension.
• Keyword search in Minion.HELP.

Because while monitoring database servers is a difficult task, managing changes across thousands of those servers takes a lot of effort. So while the two eyes are enough to pinpoint database issues, the two extra hands come in handy when doing your bidding. And besides, just look at the size of those gorgeous eyes!

We get this question a lot. The honest answer is that we want to make tools that WE want to use. We didn’t like the maintenance already out there, so we put our decades of experience behind Minion Backup, Minion Reindex, and Minion CheckDB. (And if you think those are good, take a look at Minion Enterprise, which blows the free modules out of the water.

Our documentation is extensive, and includes full explanations, examples, and more. You can download it from our website, and it also comes embedded in the products themselves. However, if you’re a better visual learner, then we also have training videos that not only teach you the concepts, but also discuss some of the nuances and give good advice for configuring the product’s features. And if you’re still unsure about something after that, then feel free to reach out to us.

I realize that some companies are afraid of xp_cmdshell, however, there’s no need to be. But to answer the actual question, we wanted a fully-functioning product. There are many limitations to T-SQL and to get the features we needed we only had two choices: xp_cmdshell and CLR. Between the two of them xp_cmdshell is the most desirable. There was no way we could require you to enable CLR on every one of your database servers. And the things we would need to be able to do in CLR would require us to make untrustworthy procedures. This is unacceptable. It’s incredibly easy to lockdown xp_cmdshell so that only sysadmins have access. So there’s no reason to be afraid of it. We explain the ins and outs of xp_cmdshell use, security, and lockdown in this article: Security Theater. Here’s a link to another blog on the topic if you’d like further reading.

MB can absolutely help you with your DR scenarios. We have features that make it very easy to switch settings between your primary and DR sites.

MB can be setup to automatically backup all your server-level and database-level certificates. You can even easily rotate encryption algorithms, passwords, and certificates for encrypted backups.

Live Insight for MB allows you to not only see what’s happening at every step of your backup process, but it also has a status monitor that shows you the percent.

MB has a very rich delete routine that allows you to make changes on the fly, report on space, construct what-if scenarios, archive backup files, and perform mass operations on an entire server. It’s very comprehensive.

This is one of the things that Minion Backup does best. You can not only tune your backups, but you can specify different tuning parameters all the way down to the time of day and backup type. There’s not a product on the market that has the level of configuration MB does for tuning your backups.

MB can be easily setup to copy files to as many locations as necessary. This is very rich functionality because it can not only copy files, but also move them as well. Not only that, but you can also use your choice of utilities to perform the actions. You can even use multiple utilities during the same backup operation if you have the need.

MB is a very easy setup. Simply supply your backup location and run the setup script. MB installs with schedules and everything else it needs and will start protecting your server immediately. We even help you do mass installations so you can roll it out to your entire organization as easily as you do to a single server.

We both have our own criteria for giving hugs, so each request is considered on an individual basis. However, we often hand out Pop-tarts in our sessions, so stop by and you might get lucky.