Incremental Database/Data Change Restore

Question

I have vendor production backup that needs to be restored onsite daily. The most frustrating part is that their installation is on SQL 2008 but the DB mode is SQL 2000. sigh!!!

The database in our site will primarily be readonly. The vendor runs any required updates/data changes to the DB on their site during the day and will send the backups to us on a daily basis. It is a smaller bak file now but will grow over time. The goal is to restore incremental updates only.

Possible workaround that I could think of are the following:

1. Keep the DB in our side in read only mode (after full backup is restored) and request the vendor to give us the diff backups every day. Of course if they take a full backup , we are back to square one.
2. Partition the database and request the vendor to give the partition group backups. This may be difficult because not all tables may be qualified for partition.
3. Replication could be an option but the vendor is not ready for this.
4. Bulk insert for individual objects could be an option but again the vendor is not ready for it.
5. CDC feature could possibly help here but again not in SQL 2000.

If you can share any other ideas that you could think of, that would be very helpful. (I agree the first step should be to asking them to upgrade)

Thanks for all your help.

Answer 1

editted based on feedback in comments

1. If you could stay readonly than a good alternative to replication could be log shipping. The vendor would create transaction log backups. And send those backup to you. You then apply those backups.You can't restore differential only, you would still need to reply a full first. Another benefit of (delayed) logshipping is that, since the source is at the vendor (where you have no control over what they do with it, you might want to build in some buffer (in time) that when they make a huge mistake, you simply pause the logshipping redo, so you still have a good copy)
2. For restoring filegroups/files you need transaction log restores as well. It can work but it highly depends on the growth rate vs the transaction log rate if I would prefer this above option 1, simply log shipping. Furhtermore, partitioning your database and table just for the sole purpose of solving your replica problem wouldn't be the route I would pick first but I have some questions for you later.
3. Replication sounds like a very good option if you think the restoring of transaction log backups becomes to much work.
4. What prohibits sql 2000 from doing Bulk Inserts? However, if you think logshipping is tedious, keeping track of updating every single object sounds like a potentially more troublesome strategy.
5. I have no experience with cdc. somebody else has to help out on that.

Couple of questions for you:

1. How big is the initial database size?
2. What will be the daily, monthly growth rate?
3. What will be the daily growth rate of the transaction log?
4. is it possible to have both locations in the same domain?
5. Is it possible to build a secure connection between the two locations?
6. What is the bandwidth between the to locations? what is the latency?

If we have some numbers, it's easier to provide you with a better advise.