Database Maintenance

ASP Customers

Database maintenance for ASP installations of SuccessWare21 is managed by the ASP. The information contained in this document does not apply to SuccessWare21 ASP Customers.

LAN Customers

While the database maintenance feature in SuccessWare21 is intended to simplify the task of database maintenance, you are ultimately responsible for the maintenance and backups of your database.

The SuccessWare21 Database Maintenance utility allows you to back up your SuccessWare21 MSSQL databases and perform other basic database maintenance options with the single push of a button. These options include database backup, integrity check, index cleanup, database shrinking and disk space monitoring.

This Database Maintenance feature is intended for SuccessWare21 databases installed on SQL Express, but can be used for MSDE or SQL Server installations as well.

Running Maintenance

Database Maintenance can be accessed from ‘Setup | Utilities | Maintenance’.

• Refresh – select refresh to check the status/schedule of each maintenance operation.
• Run Maintenance – select this button to run all maintenance options now.
• Details – opens the maintenance details form.

Maintenance Details

The Maintenance Details form has a tab for each of the maintenance options. On each tab is an explanation of the option. For some options you can choose “Get Details” or “Refresh” to gather and display information for that option. You can also choose “Run Option” the run the option by itself.

Mode/Users/Logins

This tab checks to see how many user logins exist for the SuccessWare21 Databases. Maintenance cannot be run while users are logged into the databases. If you select “Get Details” or “Refresh”, a lists of users and workstations currently logged into the SuccessWare21 Database will be listed. This tab also checks both user access and recovery modes for the SuccessWare21 Databases.

To logon and use SuccessWare21, the databases must be in multi-user mode. If one or more of the databases ever becomes stuck in single user mode, a button will be provided on this tab to “Set Multi User Mode” which will restore all SuccessWare21 Databases to multi user mode.

By default SuccessWare21 SQL Express Database installations are set to simple recovery mode. This allows copying/backing up of the database files when all users are logged off. If one or more of the databases is determined not to be in simple recovery mode, a button will be provided on this tab to “Set Simple Recovery Mode” which will restore all SuccessWare21 Databases to simple recovery mode.

Maintenance Monitoring

When maintenance monitoring is enabled, maintenance will be checked each time a user logs on or off SuccessWare21. If any of the maintenance options are overdue according to following schedule, a message will be displayed for the user.

• Recommended daily: Database Backups – a message will be displayed if this option was not performed by the SuccessWare21 Database Maintenance feature in the last 24 hours.
• Recommended weekly: Integrity check, index cleanup, database shrinking – a message will be displayed if this option was not performed by the SuccessWare21 Database Maintenance feature in the last 7 days.

Database Backups

This database maintenance utility will create backup files of your SuccessWare21 databases. It should NOT be considered a substitution for backup to a removable media (i.e. tape backup). In order to ensure backups are not unintentionally overwritten, the following backup strategy is used.

• Databases backups are stored in files name the same as the database followed by a backup name. For example, the SW21_JOEPLUMB_1001D database would be backed up into a file named SW21_JOEPLUMB_1001D_BackupA.bak, where BackupA is the backup name.
• Backup file names will consist of the word Backup and a series letter, A, B, or C.
• Three series files are used BackupA, BackupB, and BackupC.
• These series files are used to separate backups made on separate days. All backups for a day are appended to the series backup file. This ensures that if backups are made more than once a day, previous backups for that day are not lost.
• Each day a new series is used. Once ‘C’ is reached, the backup process starts back at ‘A’. This ensures that the three previous dates backup were made are safe.
• This process allows and maintains multiple backup per day and up to three days of backups.
• IMPORTANT: These backup files should be backed up, by a separate process, onto removable media. Click here for more information...

Free Disk Space

Your database grows with time and your database backups will use up disk space. If you run out of disk space on the drive where your data is stored, SuccessWare21 may experience errors. For this reason you should monitor and make sure you maintain a sufficient amount of free disk space on your data drive and backup drive. As a general rule of thumb, you should maintain approximately four times the size of your data of free space or 2 Gb; whichever is greater.