Using Page Level Restore as a Disaster Recovery Procedure in SQL Server 2005

Using Page Level Restore as a Disaster Recovery Procedure in SQL Server 2005

Let's have a look at how to use page-level restores on a corrupted database. I will still be using the Northwind database for this tip - except that the database version that I will be using is corrupted. Note that it is not that easy to generate a corrupt database in your production environment so you would have to create one on your own to test these procedures. What I did was to use a hex editor to modify the values of the database file. This would introduce inconsistencies in the database file causing it to be corrupt. You would need to do some trial-and-error to get a specific page corrupted. In my case, I have chosen to corrupt a data page affecting the Orders table as it would be easy to find the text values of the records inside this table (as compared to the Order Details table that I have been using in the previous examples which contains mostly numerical data) from the hex editor.

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