At Stedman Solutions, LLC, we recently had the opportunity to help another client with a corrupt database We were able to recover ALL their data and remove ALL the corruption. In this specific scenario Microsoft had told them their only option was to restore from a backup. Unfortunately they did not have recent corruption free backups because the corruption had been there a while before they noticed.
In this specific scenario there were 51 tables with corruption. There was some other database corruption that was in the data file, but not associated with any tables or objects.
Here is how the process went:
Phase 1 – Experimentation and discovery. Learning where the issues were and what options we had for repair. Documenting the status of each table.
Phase 2 – Eliminating corruption in the objects that would not cause data loss. For instance, dropping and re-creating non clustered indexes.
Phase 3 – Detailed investigation into each remaining table, determining what could be recovered directly, what would be missing and what would need to be recovered another way. Then determining for each of those tables how to replace the missing rows.
Phase 4 – Find all the missing data and replace it.
Phase 5 – Removing the corruption in the data file not associated with any object. This phase took approximately 50% of time of the entire repair process.
Phase 6 – Verification; confirming the database is corruption free, there is no data missing, and the database is reliable and sound.
Phase 7 – Verification that all applications work in the database as they did prior to the corruption. This phase is performed by the client as they know their application far better than we do.
In this example the entire repair process was completed just under 48 hours from when an agreement was signed and payment was made. For the majority of corrupt databases we have repaired we’ve been able to complete the repair in 48 hours or less. Only a few times has it gone beyond 48 hours.
Every corruption repair is different. The repair depends on what is corrupt, how bad the corruption is, how long that corruption had been there, and what backups are available to use in the recovery process.
My hope is that nobody encounters a corrupt database, but if you do, give us a call or schedule an appoint with Steve, at Stedman Solutions we can help.
