Welcome to the Database Corruption Challenge (DBCC). If you are just finding out about the challenge, and you would like to give it a try on your own, then don’t click the links to the solutions. Give it a try, see how you do, then check the solution.
Database Corruption Challenge History
- Week 1 Database Corruption Challenge 4/11/2015 won by Brent Ozar. (See the solution)
- Week 2 Database Corruption Challenge 4/17/2015 won by Rob Farley. (See the solution)
- Week 3 Database Corruption Challenge 4/24/2015 won by Randolph West. (See the solution)
- Week 4 Database Corruption Challenge 5/1/2015 won by Randolph West. (See the solution)
- Week 5 Database Corruption Challenge 5/12/2015 won by Patrick Flynn. (See the solution)
- Week 6 Database Corruption Challenge 5/23/2015 won by Raul Gonzalez. (See the solution)
- Week 7 Database Corruption Challenge 6/2/2015 – won by Raul Gonzalez. (See the solution)
- Week 8 Database Corruption Challenge 6/19/2015 – won by Rob Farley. (See the solution)
- Week 9 Database Corruption Challenge 7/6/2015 – won by Eduardo Rezende. (See the solution)
- Week 10 Database Corruption Challenge 7/17/2015 – won by Rob Farley. (See the solution)
The Corruption Challenge started in April of 2015 and ran through July of 2015. Many participated, many solved corruption, and many people learned something along the way.
Blog Interviews of Top Scoring Participants
- Rob Farley
- André Kamman
- Raul Gonzalez
- Neil Abrahams
- more coming soon…
Scoring the Challenge
Here are the scoring criteria that for the first 10 weeks event.
Updated 5/31/2015.
- Each week you can earn the following points:
- 2 points for being the first to submit a correct solution, as long as you mention the contest on twitter, with a link.
- 1 point for submitting a correct solution before the deadline.
- Bonus: 1 extra point to everyone who completes the challenge before any extra clues are provided. I will wait at least 24 hours before posting any extra clues.
- Once in the competition you can earn points for the following:
- 1 point for creating a blog post or LinkedIn post that talks about the challenge, and links to http://SteveStedman.com/corruption (if you do this you should email a link to the post). For the LinkedIn Post, status updates don’t count, you need to click the “Publish a Post” link.
Current Leaders
To see the current leaders visit the current scores page.
Getting Help from Steve and the Team
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Steve,
You came up with lots of great corruption situations. We have an availability group setup here so I was wondering if there are any special tips for working on an availability group corruption other than perhaps dropping the database from the availability group and fixing it then adding the database back into the availability group.
Thanks
Chris
Chris,
I like working on a backed up and restored copy of the database when dealing with corruption (if possible). With availability groups, I would back up the database, fix the corruption, then put it back into the availability group.
Another option as you suggest would be to drop the database from the availability group, fix the corruption and put it back in the availability group.
Whatever you decided to do, be sure that the first thing you do is establish a way to get it back to the current state, because if something goes wrong that current (corrupt) state may be better than where you end up, and if you have a way to try it again that may save your database when something goes wrong.
-Steve
Thanks for the reply Steve.
I should have followed your ‘always have a recovery plan’ approach more closely.
Maybe you can confirm something I had heard that the corruption does not get replicated to the secondary node(s). Is this true?
Chris
Looks like the links for the zip files for week 3 and 5 may be missing.
Pages updated… The links to the files have been fixed.
-Steve Stedman