Helpful Advice?

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Helpful Advice?

  • You mean you don't just automatically do all of those things every day?

    I have a job that runs them automatically every day, right in the middle of peak business hours, when our websites and databases are under maximum load. That insures the best results!

    Especially the bit about repeatedly cycling the power on the SAN. That's critical!

    ...

    Meanwhile, back in reality, I've had to restore a database and move on, but that was before I actually knew about point-in-time options on DR.

    I once had to take a database offline and rebuild a copy of it from backups, but I brought it up to present-time without any data loss. That was to handle a locked SPID that just simply would not finish rolling back a non-existent transaction, which was blocking a few database level operations that were needed.

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  • Oh don't even get me started.

    The latest thing that really gets me is people writing blog posts recommending things like this (or deleting transaction logs, detaching suspect databases, etc, etc) then they moderate comments and never approve comments that explain how terrible that advice really is. So people run across those blog posts and see only good comments. Wonderful. :-/

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass
  • I've checked all of my servers and can't find any drives with a power switch!!

  • The guy that said "Just rebuild your transaction log..." maybe meant "recreate the transaction log" in order to have less than 50 VLFs. Maybe dbas from other countries sometimes mix up terms like rebuild or recreate?

    My advice (and I hope this is a better advice :-p):

    Know exactly when, why and what you are doing, so you may know the outcome/implications before you start.

  • I had to run with the "Allow Data Loss" once. It was the only option left after it was determined that the Backups were rubbish. It was a 3TB Database and it took 8 days to run.

    Needless to say, many lessons learned from this exercise.

  • David Conn (11/30/2011)


    I had to run with the "Allow Data Loss" once. It was the only option left after it was determined that the Backups were rubbish. It was a 3TB Database and it took 8 days to run.

    Needless to say, many lessons learned from this exercise.

    How much data did you lose?

  • 10 Pages.

    worse part after the time it took was not knowing what I'd lost. The only upside is that it's a Data Warehouse and in percentage terms this is a small amount of data.

  • David Conn (12/1/2011)


    10 Pages.

    worse part after the time it took was not knowing what I'd lost. The only upside is that it's a Data Warehouse and in percentage terms this is a small amount of data.

    On a narrow sales table you can pack a couple $100 millions in sales with the right sort of products (like higer end cars or machinery) 😉

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