In the past two weeks we had some interesting Solution center articles describing Microsoft SQL Server topics – each described as the problem (or the challenge) users may encounter with SQL Server data recovery
Any of recovery options using Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio requires the availability of a full database backup. And, the backup must be restored in order to be used as a recovery data source
July 5, 2013Recovering DELETED records is something we would all like to avoid, but no matter how careful we are, it can come to that. Having regular full database and transaction log backups is a necessary practice and a great advantage in this situation, but even then, bringing back the deleted records might not be easy
June 4, 2013ApexSQL Diff and ApexSQL Data Diff provide a user friendly GUI for SQL comparison and synchronization of database schemas and database objects. They both include the command line interface which provides the exact same options, and which you can use to schedule unattended comparisons and synchronizations
But, what can be done when the features that the GUI and CLI provide are simply not enough? In such cases a more flexible solution is needed and the good news is – there’s a programmable API
April 30, 2013When synchronizing large databases that contain millions of records, you will come across several challenges The first challenge is to just compare such databases. When the database tables contain millions of records, their comparison through the ApexSQL Data Diff graphical interface will be very slow and in such cases, it is strongly recommend using the ApexSQL Data Diff command line interface. As there’s no need to show millions of records visually in the tool’s grid, such large databases are processed faster.
April 29, 2013The applications used by travelling sales representatives, or other field workers – delivery drivers, visiting nurses, etc. are designed to collect data from remote locations and then send it to a data center. Also, the data from the data center, occasionally need to be sent back to these remote locations, to keep them up to date.
For example, whenever nurses pay a visit to a patient, they enter the information about the visit into the database on mobile devices. At the end of the day, all these entries created during the day are sent to the central database in a hospital. After that, the nurses can synchronize mobile devices with the database in the hospital data center, so they get the new information about their patients, and also, the information about any new visits they need to make the next day.
In the scenario such as this, there’s constantly a need to synchronize the information from a mobile device to a central database.
April 19, 2013There are numerous scenarios when data synchronization between the two databases is needed, such as distributing data to different locations, integration of data from different locations into a central repository, or just a simple synchronization between your test and production database.
The recommended solution is to use database replication.
However, even with database replication there’s a need to check whether all the data is synchronized and to synchronize it if needed.
April 4, 2013DBAs are well aware that downgrading a SQL Server database cannot be done out of the box. Even when the compatibility level of the database you want to migrate to an older SQL Server version matches that version, you can’t simply restore the backup. What you probably didn’t expect is that upgrading can also be a problem
April 4, 2013If there was need to restore a SQL Server database backup to an older version of SQL Server there was “greeting” with error messages along the lines of:
Msg 3169, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally.
or
Msg 3241, Level 16, State 7, Line 1
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally.
and the attempted backup restore would fail.
April 4, 2013If you ever needed to quickly revert an inadvertent change such as an UPDATE without a WHERE clause, to recover missing or corrupt data, to move data across your development, test, integration and production environments or even just to avoid generating a report using a busy production SQL Server database as a data source, you must’ve wondered if there is a way just to restore specific rows instead of restoring the whole database backup.
April 4, 2013“I’ve mistakenly deleted/updated important records in a SQL Server table. Is there any way to get these records back?”
This is a frequently asked question, and very often a headache for DBAs. If they are careful and make regular database backups, they can recover the lost database data even where the SIMPLE recovery database model is used
If that is the case, then database backups are the only solution to recover the lost database data. The deleted data has to be from the period prior to the database backup creation
April 4, 2013
