I hope someone can at least point me in the right direction on this one.
I've written some procs and created appropriate tables to replicate logshipping without incurring the added expense of Enterprise, just for the GUI.
I'm now looking for ways to extend/enhance this functionality. Currently I use a commandline compression app (bzip2) to compress the tran log backup after it's been written to disk, and although it works, I was thinking it would be nice if I could capture the backup stream on the fly (before it get's written to disk) and compress it before writing to disk. I've found several products that do this, but almost no documentation on the actual process of capturing the backup output.
Through a little sleuthing, I was able to create a device with sp_addumpdevice using a named pipe, and a small .Net app that was to read from that pipe, but I'm running into a problem. For some reason, all I get is the header information, then SQL server seems to expect a response from me and if I don't respond within a certain timeframe (let alone that I have no idea what to send it) it closes the pipe and the backup operation fails with a device write error, listing OS error 232(pipe being closed) in the logs.
Any assistance that someone could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this gobbledy-gook!