Category: Backups/Recovery

When Things That Are Supposed to Protect You Try to Kill You

This past week I was presented with a very unique issue.  A call came in with a production issue on a tier one application.  Unfortunately it was on a system that utilizes SQL 2000 SP4.  Having a rather small toolset to use for support I had to rely on Perfmon, sysprocesses and the usual old […]

How to restore the tail end of a transaction log

Have you ever tried to restore a backup over an existing database and receive an error stating the tail of the log for the database has not been backed up? Many times if you are just restoring a database into a development environment you don’t care so you just restore WITH REPLACE and move on. […]

Find the version of the Master DB from a backup

Try researching recovering the master database online and you will see countless references to having to have SQL at the same version and builld level as the backup of the master database.  Since most folks probably don’t have a routine in place to record the version number each time SQL server is patched we need […]

Checking Backups

Over the past two years I have acquired quite a few database servers that I am responsible for.  We have many standards among the database group I am a part of, things such as standard drive configurations (drive for data files, log files, tempdb, and backup),  lock down scripts, maintenance jobs, etc.  Over time I […]