Questions Following Corruption Presentation – Video

These are 5 questions asked after our February 2020 corruption presentation. Hope these answers help you as well.

Transcription:

0:10
Q: So our very first question is in regards to check DB when you’re when you’re mentioning people who are colorblind. He asks, “Can you use with no messages?”

Steve Stedman 0:24
A: Yes, absolutely. And you know, it’s check DB. And the parameter is with, with underscore with, and then it’s no underscore info messages. And I use that all the time, just because I don’t like to see all this stuff. That’s good. I only want to see what’s bad when we’re tracking things down. And absolutely, that’s a great way to look at it. And if you’re looking at putting parameters on there, and you’re adding the width, no info messages, I usually add the width data purity option as well, just to do a little bit deeper check there. Good question. Yep.

0:56
Q: “I’ve taken a copy only backup to move to another server and restore previously, is the is the copy only part considered a good practice?”

Derrick Bovenkamp 1:07
A: So I would say, you know, certainly, if you have separate log backups in place, and you don’t want to disturb that backup chain, and you want to create a second separate backup, then yes, I would do a copy only. I would also potentially look at doing a copy only, you know, if you suspect corruption. Yep. Both can both can be good.

Steve Stedman 1:34
Now in the key there is that the copy only is one that’s taken out of the normal sequence. If your your normal sequence, you should never be doing that. But if it’s something that’s just to go and put it on a dev server or dried out, absolutely, yeah. Like Derek said, there,

Derrick Bovenkamp 1:45
okay. And then you also need the copy only if you have a sequence, and then you’re doing a separate like VM level backup.

1:55
Q: “For people who want to learn how to deal with database corruption. Do any of your “Database Corruption Challenges” include step by step instructions?”

Steve Stedman 2:05
A: Oh, yes. Now, the way that the? That’s a great question. So the database corruption challenge, it’s 10 different corrupt databases over 10 weeks. And they range in difficulty from medium to devilish. And with them, we the way it’s presented as it’s here’s the problem, you go and fix it. And then we don’t give any of the mean. And as long as you don’t click one of the solution links, you have a chance to go attempt it with just what you know. But if you don’t know where to proceed, on most of the corruption challenges, we had at least one and typically two or three solutions provided, generally I had my solution of how I would fix it. And then we also had the solution of whoever won the corruption challenge that week. And I think that I saw Randolph West listed on the call, he’s got a couple of weeks where he wanted that are listed there with his solution. So and in the solutions that goes through step by step, every little step of the way, everything you had to do to fix it.

3:08
Q: Don’t panic is a key point. So what technique can be used to fix SQL Server metadata corruption.

Steve Stedman 3:22
So I assume when you’re saying metadata, that would be the system tables and the part that describes the database. And yeah, that’s a really, really tough spot to be in. And we’ve dealt with a number of those. And, frankly, it is really challenging to fix any of those system tables or the like the parts of the SQL server that start up. And there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. I mean, we’ve seen some where the boot page of the database is destroyed, and the database won’t come online because of that. And one of the things we do there is take it offline and go and actually use a hex editor and byte and copy the binary data and replace it to make it work. Now, that’s you’d want to do that with a copy of things, not with the production database. The other thing that we do that’s more common on the repair is extract what we can and then put it into a brand new empty database. And if you’ve got a way that you can script out the whole database, and create a new empty database and move things over, that’s one way to try it. But it’s not always that easy. I mean, sometimes that’s several days worth of work to do that type of thing.

Kiana Bergsma 4:33
Q: It has to do with SQL Server CU updates that you mentioned to keep up to date. Starting a new high priority project in in dev currently. About CU9 See you nine last week, when would you apply it?

Steve Stedman 5:04
You know, there’s, it’s it’s one of those that it really comes down a lot to it depends. And really what it depends on is how I mean, how long is that? Usually a week? I mean, I would be fine putting that into your test your dev or maybe your QA system. But usually I let it go a little bit longer. Before I put it on a production system.

Derrick Bovenkamp 5:28
Now anything because you said it’s about to go into a QA if that’s a separate, QA step before it goes live? Yeah, I would probably throw it on QA. And by the time you get a live, it will have been out, you know, at least at least three weeks, probably.

Steve Stedman 5:44
Yep. And you know, that being said, I mean, I did an upgrade over the weekend. And it was one that hadn’t been upgraded in four or five years. And I put cu nine on for No, it wasn’t cu nine It was no I’m mixing it up, but I put it in the freshest one for SQL 2016 Yeah, cuz it’s only 2019 Yeah, I’m mixing them up. So yeah, and there was what was it cu seven for SQL Server 2019. That was a bad update. And if you’d installed that the day it came out you would have had a lot of problem but by waiting a couple of weeks Microsoft pulled it and retracted it and hopefully prevented a lot of people from having problems with it.

Derrick Bovenkamp 6:24
Yeah, and actually further in that question, it says prod is a month away So yeah, I would certainly load it in your QA and yeah, that’s a curious for Yep.

 

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