Tuesday, April 12, 2011

SQL Database Recovery to Handle Database Page Corruption

Microsoft SQL Server uses numerous objects to effectively manage your valuable data within the database and a database page is one among them. MDF (Master Database File) or MS SQL Server database is internally divided into pages. Every database page includes one 96-byte header, which contains page related information such as page type, page number, free space, and page ID. When metadata structure corruption takes place, it usually fails to read the pages and cause data loss. Data loss is one of the most critical situations that a computer user may face. It puts you in need of comprehensive SQL Recovery solutions.

SQL Server database pages are very much prone to corruption and may leave your data unusable in a number of cases. The pages corruption might be the outcome of improper editing of MDF file. As a practical example of the problem, you may come across the subsequent error message while attempting to mount an SQL Server database:

“Could not read and latch page P_ID with latch type TYPE. OPERATION failed.”

You get this error every time you try to mount your database. This behavior makes your significant data completely inaccessible. In such critical situations, you are required to find out the root cause of this issue and then fix it using SQL database recovery solutions.

Reason:

The most frequent causes of this problem with Microsoft SQL Server database corruption can be any of the following ones:

• The page that you are trying to access is in the repairing state.
• SQL Server is performing an intermediate operation on particular page.
• The page is read as the part of every checks of significant SQL database system tables.
• The page is too damaged to be recognized by MS SQL Server.

You may face this issue due to either logical or physical MDF file corruption.

Solution:

Use any of the following MDF recovery solutions to work around this issue-

• Detect and fix consistency issues using DBCC CHECKDB command. It is an inbuilt SQL repair tool of SQL Server.
• Restore database from the latest backup.
• When both the above solutions fail to work, go for third-party SQL database recovery software.

SQL Recovery applications are helpful to scan whole database and recover SQL database in all corruption scenarios. They help you recover all database objects, including Tables, reports, forms, Macros, queries, constraints, and more.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

SQL Recovery to Fix “Repair this error..” Error in SQL Server Database

Microsoft SQL Server is an advanced RDBMS from Microsoft Corporation, which has three major versions- Microsoft SQL Server 2008, 2005, and 2000. It offers a wide range of features over the other database management systems, such as reliability, high-performance, and consistency. In order to check and fix consistency errors, it include DBCC CHECKDB tool. This is an inbuilt utility of the SQL Server that helps you perform SQL Database Recovery by fixing the common database problems.

DBCC CHECKDB is an advanced database maintainace command-line utility, which supports various parameters. You must follow the proper instructions while using these parameters, as some of the options may remove damaged data and cause complete data loss. DBCC CHECDB works in both physical and logical data problems. It provides errors that can be used to analyze the fix the problem.

However, under some circumstances, the command-line SQL recovery tool gives you error when it can not handle the problem. As an example of this problem with MS SQL Server database, consider the following error mesasge that occurs while scanning the database using DBCC CHECKDB command-

Server: Msg 8905, Level 16, State 1, Line 0
Extent (1:6945928) in database ID 8 is marked allocated in the GAM, but no SGAM or IAM has allocated it.
Server: Msg 8905, Level 16, State 1, Line 0
Extent (1:6945936) in database ID 8 is marked allocated in the GAM, but no SGAM or IAM has allocated it.
Server: Msg 8905, Level 16, State 1, Line 0
Extent (1:6945944) in database ID 8 is marked allocated in the GAM, but no SGAM or IAM has allocated it.

Subsequent to the above error message, you may also get the following error-

“Repairing this error requires other errors to be corrected first.”

To repair SQL database in such cases, you must first identify the root of the problem and then fix it using SQL recovery solutions.

Cause-

As stated in the above error messages, this problem occurs due to corruption to the SQL Server database. Corruption may occur after virus infection, unexpected system shutdown, application malfunction, and other similar reasons.

Resolution-

When DBCC CHECKDB cannot handle database corruption, SQL database recovery software come for your help. The SQL repair applications are designed to scan whole database using advanced scanning algorithms and handle all cases of corruption. Stellar Pheonix SQL Server Recovery is the most advnaced and comprehensive software to recover SQL database.