Bug in Database Maintenance Plans Enterprise Manager and MSDE v SQL

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From: John D. Sullivan (noone_at_nothing.com)
Date: 07/14/04 

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:36:38 -0400

I have seen this "bug" many times personally, but cannot seem to find any
posting on the Internet about it. I have many customers using MSDE

The bug is with the Database Maintenance Plans of Microsoft SQL Enterprise
Manager when connecting to MSDE.

Yes, yes, I realize that MSDE (Microsoft SQL Desktop Edition) does NOT
include licence for Enterprize Manager (EM)... but any technician who does
have a licenced copy of SQL (Standard, Enterprize etc) CAL (Client Access
Licence) does have Enterprize Manager and can connect and manage MSDE and
SQL engines/servers equally well.

Consider
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;295022&Product=sql
Here we see substantiation that one "can" use EM and Maintenance Plans on
MSDE, albeit that you had better be the latest Service Pack since the
sqlmaint feature was overlooked in the original release to market.

The bug I am reporting is with the "Remove after X Weeks/Days" option for
Database Backup, Transaction Backup (and Log text files). This is important
because unless you can also choose to do so, one will end up filling the
hard disk with far too many SQL dumps.

If connected to an SQL server... the option works fine. If connected to an
MSDE, the option fails to provie the drop-down for days/weeks and the
resulting job created has bugs in the command line options of the job step
which one must then go and manually tweak to be correct (never report a bug
without a workaround eh? ;-P)

John D. Sullivan
ABELSoft Corporation
(email address munged)

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