CHECKDB and Corruption

In my last post, I talked about how you can get 43%-67% faster backups. Today, I’m using that same SQL Server setup to discuss how throwing more CPU cores might help you check for corruption faster if you’ve already got modern fast storage. I don’t expect everyone to go to this level of detail by…

You want to check for corruption, but you don’t want to slow down your primary production server. In this post, I’m specifically talking about offloading the corruption checking process. I’m not talking about doing corruption checking on both the primary and other servers – that’s wonderful, and if you’re doing that, you should hug yourself. You’re doing…

Hard Enough At this point, we’ve all probably got a database that’s a terabyte or more in size. If you’re anything like I was, you’ve got a ton of multi-terabyte databases, and the SAN admin has a special folder for your emails. When you’ve got a lot of large databases, normal maintenance is out the…

Microsoft has been resting on Paul Randal’s laurels for far too long. From 1999 to 2007, Paul poured his heart and soul into rewriting SQL Server’s code to check for and repair database corruption. (For more about his illustrious career, read his bio and enjoy the infectious enthusiasm in his bio photo.) Paul did great…

You’ve been such a good database administrator. You followed the setup checklist in our First Responder Kit. You ran sp_Blitz. You set up email alerts for common issues. You run CHECKDB as frequently as practical – weekly, or maybe even daily. But you just assume it’s all working. There’s an easy way to test: go…

So far in this series, I’ve shown you how to corrupt a clustered index, then how nonclustered indexes can be corrupted independently. If you haven’t read those, you should start there first. Let’s start again with our 50Ways database, but this time we’re going to be good and make sure that we’ve got checksums enabled,…

In part 1, I showed you how to corrupt a database – not because you’d need to do it, or because SQL Server has some kind of vulnerability. I just wanted to show you how SQL Server reacts when it finds corruption in a data file, why you should check your databases for CHECKSUM settings, and…

Hold my beer. Transact-SQL CREATE DATABASE [50Ways]; GO ALTER DATABASE [50Ways] SET PAGE_VERIFY NONE; /* Normally a bad idea */ GO USE [50Ways]; GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[ToLeaveYourLover]([Way] VARCHAR(50)); GO INSERT INTO [dbo].[ToLeaveYourLover]([Way]) VALUES ('Slip out the back, Jack'), ('Make a new plan, Stan'), ('Hop on the bus, Gus'), ('Drop off the key, Lee') GO SELECT…