To know when the last full backup of your database occurred you can look at the backupserver logfile, of course. But you don’t have to. Indeed you can find this information with Sybase ASE using the command “dbcc dbtable”.
dbcc traceon(3604)
go
dbcc dbtable("model")
go
Dbcc dbtable prints the dbtable structure for a database and the last backup date of this dbtable structure. To find out when the last dump database was performed for your database, you need to look for the string “dbt_backup_start”. A full dbcc dbtable output can be found here with dbt_backup_start informations highlighted in red.
Note: the value of dbt_backup_start is updated each time you backup your database with “dump database”.
Is that usefull ? What can I do with that ?
I use the last full backup date to secure the all database backup process with my shell scripts. My shell scripts perform a transaction log backup if no “dump database” has been performed manually outside of the backup jobs launched by the job scheduler (crontab, control-M or Sybase job scheduler etc…), otherwise they raise an error. This guarantees that every transactions logs backup are related to a unique database backup.
Also, it’s a time saving way to know when the last database dump was performed without wasting time looking into your logfiles (but it will not tell you if your backup was successfull or not).
