We've had reports of queries running slowly or timing out early in the morning, and the only job I see running that I think could affect this is our database backup job.
The database itself is about 300GB, and the backup job starts at 4:30am and doesn't finish until a little after 7:00am. The current syntax of our backup job is:
BACKUP DATABASE [DatabaseName]
TO DISK = N'E:\Database Backups\DatabaseName.Bak'
WITH INIT, NOUNLOAD, NAME = N'DatabaseName.Bak',
NOSKIP, STATS = 10, NOFORMAT
E:\
is a partition on the server which holds both the databases and the database backups.
It should also probably be noted that this is a virtual server, not a dedicated standalone server. We started getting complaints about slowdowns during the backup process right after we switched to a virtual server, so I think it may be related.
Is there a way to run this backup job so it doesn't affect the query performance while its running?
We are using SQL Server 2005