Tag Archives: backup

DTExec: The package execution returned DTSER_FAILURE (1)

What to do when a SQL backup job created with SQL server Maintenance Plans fails with this error?

Investigate! No useful information in the logs.
Previously that day I dropped a few unneeded databases so maybe the Maintenance Plan was still referencing them. Everything looked good when the Maintenance Plan was opened in SSMS (it was configured to backup “SELECTED” databases), I could not find any reference to the deleted databases. Under the hood, the Maintenance Plan was still trying to backup those deleted databases because when I clicked OK and then hit Save, that Maintenance Plan was refreshed and everything worked just fine.

So always try to find the root cause.

T-SQL to generate backup and restore commands

Hi guys,

Since my day to day job is a DBA, I figured I will share stuff that others might find useful.
For the first time I will share a small script which will help you generate T-SQL commands in order to script the backup/restore process of your SQL Server.

This was tested on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (SP1) – Express Edition (64-bit). Feel free to send your comments.

Bash script to backup my configs (dotfiles)

I needed some script to take care of my config files and put them in a single directory. So here it is.

Backup your MySQL databases automatically with AutoMySQLBackup

If you are a MySQL user and you want to have a disaster recovery solution, or even as a simple backup, you can write small shell scripts based on mysqldump tool.

For this, you need AutoMySQLBackup. It doesn’t have any real requirements (mysqldump of course is needed – in any mysql client package – and gzip or bzip2 to compress the resulting file) and has all the features I was looking for in such a script.

AutoMySQLBackup has all the features I needed: it can backup a single database, multiple databases, or all the databases on the server; each database is saved in a separate file that can be compressed (with gzip or bzip2); it will rotate the backups and not keep them filling your hard drive (as normal in the daily backup you will have only the last 7 days of backups, the weekly if enabled will have one for each week, etc.). It has also some other features (check the project homepage for full details), that I am not using myself (like email logs for example), but other peoples might find interesting.

All you have to do is to modify a few things:

# Username to access the MySQL server e.g. dbuser
USERNAME=dbuser
# Username to access the MySQL server e.g. password
PASSWORD=password
# Host name (or IP address) of MySQL server e.g localhost
DBHOST=localhost
# List of DBNAMES for Daily/Weekly Backup e.g. "DB1 DB2 DB3"
DBNAMES="all"
# Backup directory location e.g /backups
BACKUPDIR="/var/backup/mysql"
# Mail setup
MAILCONTENT="quiet"

You can run the script manually but you will want to enable it in cron
and run daily.