A few months ago we hosted Sean McCown for a talk about indexing tips and backup performance.

On this show, we have Sean again.

Sean reveals tons of backup tips and tricks while talking about his new free product, Minion Backup.

Among other topics, we talk about:

• What are VLF's and why it's not good to have many of them
• When you SHOULD use shrink
• Why Sean doesn't like Policy Based Management
• How to monitor backup progress
• Regular Expressions in SSMS

And as always with our guests, we play Scattergories, and Sean tells a VERY interesting story about cluster configuration.

Items mentioned in the show:

• Minion Backup
• Sean's PASS Summit session – Monster Text Manipulation: Regular Expressions for the DBA
• Sean's PASS Summit precon – The Enterprise Scripting Workshop

About Sean:

Sean McCown is a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server 2008. He is also a SQL Server MVP with over 20 years experience in databases. Sean is also founder and co-owner of the renowned website MidnightDBA.com where he records free SQL Server training videos and co-hosts the popular webshow, DBAs@Midnight.