Restore and Recovery Operations

Restore testing, restore performance, rollback, and recovery procedures.

25 associated posts24 primary posts

Production DBA

DBA Training Plan 3: Treat Your Servers Like Cattle, Not Like Pets

July 22, 2019

In our last post in this series, I talked about why you should be using Ola Hallengren's maintenance script for backups and sp_DatabaseRestore for faster restores. These two tools have implications for how you build, back up, recover, and fail over your SQL Server.

There's a saying in the cloud: treat your servers like cattle, not like pets.

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Production DBA

DBA Training Plan 2: Backups (And More Importantly, Restores)

July 17, 2019

When I first started out as a SQL Server DBA, I thought things were going well as long as the backup jobs ran successfully. I'd go into SQL Server Agent every now and then, make sure they were still running, and ... that was the end of it. I figured if disaster ever struck, I'd just do a restore. How hard could it be? I was missing the entire point.

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[Video] Demoing SQL Server 2019’s new Accelerated Database Recovery

March 4, 2019

Wouldn't it be nice if rollbacks just finished instantly? Wouldn't you love for startup times to be near-zero even when SQL Server crashed just as someone in the middle of a transaction? How much would you pay for all this? (Well, I'm a little afraid to ask that, since we don't know yet whether this is an Enterprise-only feature, but dang, I sure hope not.)

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[Video] Office Hours 2019/1/2 (With Transcriptions)

January 5, 2019

This week, Brent, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss whether you need to premake a destination database in order to run sp_databaserestore, restoring production statistics on dev servers to simulate productions behavior, dealing with duplicate SPNs, tools for detecting all SQL Servers in a production environment, SQL performance monitoring, dealing with very large indexes, and Brent's recent cruise.

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/12/19 (With Transcriptions)

December 23, 2018

This week, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss disaster recovery, Python vs C# for SQL Server, whether you should perform log backups on primary or secondary on AGs, why Postgres is so popular, using mount points for tempdb, attention events, database corruption, MERGE statements, restoring a table from a database, features they look forward to in SQL Server 2019, and how Santa is able to visit all those homes in one night...

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Production DBA

How to Restore a SQL Server Database into Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Redux

March 16, 2018

Anything Brent Can Do
There's some things you can do with Managed Instances, and some ways you can look at data that you can't do elsewhere.

For instance, you have the ability to start an restore ASYNC -- that means if your session drops, the restore will continue headlessly in the background.

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Production DBA

Builder Day: Doing a Point-in-Time Restore in Amazon RDS for SQL Server

June 21, 2017

Brent had an idea that we should set aside a day per month where we could build things in the cloud and blog about our experiences. I was tasked with Amazon RDS for SQL Server: create an instance, configure backups and test point-in-time restores. After grabbing some coffee, I logged into the AWS console. We…

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Production DBA

Builder Day: Doing a Point-in-Time Restore in Azure SQL DB

June 20, 2017

We're trying something new at the company: Builder Day. We define a slightly-out-of-the-norm task, and then the team splits up and tackles the task on different cloud platforms, writing it up as we go. These posts aren't going to make you an expert on the topic - they're just meant to let you skim through technologies you might not otherwise get the chance to play with. The cloud changes fast, so some of this is just about seeing what providers are up to these days.

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The Easiest Way to Restore Transaction Logs to A Point In Time (Spoiler: Use AmazonRDS)

July 16, 2015

... is to use a SQL Server where a robot does it for you! Let's take a look at how you can do this in AmazonRDS's hosted SQL Server these days.  Normally, restoring transaction logs is super tedious. You've got to restore all the files in the right order, for every single database. Even if…

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Production DBA

How to Restore a Page in SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Edition

November 11, 2014

One of the many restore features in SQL Server is the ability to restore one or more pages of data. This can be very convenient in some narrow situations - for example, corruption occurs on one page or an oops update is made to one record. The page restore process is not straightforward, however, and,…

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