SQL Server 2012 introduces Database Recovery Advisor that provides significant user experience improvements to the ways DBAs can restore databases with SQL Server Management Studio. As we know, SQL Server provides a variety of backup types, so creating the proper recovery sequence for each point in time can be tricky at times. This is where Database Recovery Advisor is useful, because it makes the database restoration process more agile by helping the customers to create more predictable and optimal recovery sequence.

The Database Recovery Advisor provides a visual timeline from the backup history of the database and then presents the available points in time at which the user can restore the database, algorithms to streamline the identification of the appropriate sets of backup media to restore the database back to a specific point in time. By default, the Database Recovery Advisor tries to restore the database from the last backup taken, but as I said earlier, we can use visual timeline feature to restore the database to an earlier point than last full backup.

The Database Recovery Advisor is available via Restore Database dialog box, which you can launch as follow:

1) Right-click database which you want to restore and then navigate to “Databases…” and then click on “Databases…” to launch Restore Database dialog box.

2) In Restore Database dialog box, click “TimeLine…” button to launch Database Recovery Advisor visual timeline.

3) Choose “Specific date and time” option and then use the arrow to specify the restore point. After choosing the appropriate restore restore point, click OK button to return to Database Restore dialog box (see below):

4) Click OK button in Database Restore dialog box to start the database restore (see below):

Conclusion

The Database Recovery Advisor is a great feature of SQL Server 2012, allowing users with a visual timeline of database restore points from backup history. As we have seen in this post, this feature is easy to use and with the help of this feature we can easily perform point-in-time database restore.