I have a compilation of scripts which I use on a daily basis to help me make my work a bit easier. I always mention during my presentations that the laziest people are administrators who happen to have a programming background. Here’s one that I frequently use. A message on my instant messenger popped up asking me how to quickly perform backups of databases in SQL Server. I told him to write a BACKUP DATABASE command. Now, he was telling me about how much time it would take since they have like hundreds of databases. The solution: write a script. The script below performs a backup of all the databases on a SQL Server 2000 instance and dumps it in a local folder.

DECLARE @IDENT INT, @sql VARCHAR(1000), @DBNAME VARCHAR(200)
SELECT @IDENT=MIN(DBID) FROM SYSDATABASES WHERE [DBID] > 0 AND NAME NOT IN ('PUBS', 'NORTHWIND', 'TEMPDB')
WHILE @IDENT IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
SELECT @DBNAME = NAME FROM SYSDATABASES WHERE DBID = @IDENT
/*Change disk location here as required*/
SELECT @SQL = 'BACKUP DATABASE ' + @DBNAME + ' TO DISK = ''F:\BACKUP'+@DBNAME+'.BAK'' WITH INIT, STATS=10'
PRINT "==========================================="
EXEC (@SQL)
PRINT "Backup for database " + @DBNAME + " has been created"
SELECT @IDENT=min(DBID) FROM SYSDATABASES WHERE [DBID] > 0 AND DBID>@IDENT AND NAME NOT IN ('PUBS', 'NORTHWIND', 'TEMPDB')
END

This excludes the tempdb, Northwind and Pubs databases should you have it in your instance. Restoring is, of course, a different story. You need to start with the system databases (master and msdb, in my case) before you can restore the user databases. In a future blog post, I’ll have a script to read the backups generated by this script and restore them all. See how lazy I can be?