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Thursday, September 15, 2011

SQL Server BOL - Getting Very Decent

The last month I have been working on backup and restore operations and how to automate the process - to be used in an external job scheduler.  And I have the blessing at my new position to have a heavily used test environment that does a lot of backups, restores, and copies from production.  This has enabled me to experience recovery path forks pretty well.  After a half day of working out what all the fields in backupset stand for and how to determine the proper recovery path for any given fork I found a link that took me to the 2005 documentation on recovery forks.  It provided me with a little new information that I then worked on for a day.

The I switched over to the 2008 R2 documentation and it had new, useful information.  I must say that it validated a lot of what I had determined and pointed out what a few more fields were there for.  And in the process answered the question that I was actually at.

Hooray for the continuous improvement in the BOL @ Microsoft!

And incidentally today I stumbled across a single sentence in BOL that answered an open question of mine.  That being "how do I repopulate the backup/restore tables in msdb from old backups when they get restored from tape?"   (RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM <insert_file_name> WITH LOADHISTORY)

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