Partial restore vs Piecemeal Restore

  • I have used piecemeal restores a number of times. AFAIK you always restore the primary filegroup before restoring any other filegroups in a piecemeal restore.

    My question comes from the MCM video on partial and piecemeal restores. Kimberly Tripp restores a database file without first restoring the primary filegroup. So this raises 2 questions:

    1. is there a difference between a partial and piecemeal restore?

    2. why would you use piecemeal, if partial allows you to restore a file without having to restore the primary filegroup?

  • I would say that piecemeal restore is a sequence partial restores, beginning with the primary filegroup. The two are not the same. When you restore the primary filegroup, you will have to restore all the other filegroups to bring those online. If you perform a partial restore of a non primary filegroup, you don't have to restore the other filegroups.

    Piecemeal restore is a technique used to increase availability by bringing the filegroups online as they they are restored.

    Partial restore is a technique used to increase availability by only restoring the filegroups needed, eg only restore the archive filegroup if the archive LUN on the SAN got corrupt.



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