June 28, 2017 at 9:15 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Handling Data Corruption
June 29, 2017 at 7:43 am
So, how to establish a timeline for when data corruption first occurred?
Off the top of my head, the first place I'd look would be error logs, both SQL Server and Windows. That could tell you the exact moment something broke. Also, scheduled processes like backups and maintenance plans are more likely to trip over data corruption long before your end users start seeing it, so check for error messages in job history.
Where I work now, we already a scheduled process in place that queries for critical errors and sends alerts via e-mail and SlackBot.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
June 29, 2017 at 8:01 am
I'm no longer have any DBA responsibilities in my new role. However, when I was responsible for about 35 production servers in a virtualized environment, where I had no access to any SAN information or VMWare tools, I did my best to proactively monitor for corruption to limit the possible damage. I built out an SSIS/SSRS process that every day iterated through the latest full backups for each database, restoring each to a backup server, running DBCC checkdb, archiving the results, and sending me an email alert if any errors were encountered. I also created a deliberately corrupted database just to verify that the process worked as expected.
Remediation steps in the event of any corruption largely varied based on the extent of any corruption detected. Assuming it wasn't just a non-clustered index that could be dropped and re-created, my protocol was to restore the preceding full backup, run check db, and if it passed begin applying log backups to try to determine when the corruption occurred and how much potential data loss there was. After that, it would be a business decision for management. We are facing x hours of data loss for this database and associated system. How much are you willing to spent on support and/or consulting resources to attempt recovery?
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