This video is a compilation of different database recovery techniques that SQL Server DBAs should be familiar and comfortable with. We will look at recovering a database to a specific point in time, isolating critical objects or using table partitioning as an HA/DR option (more commonly called online piecemeal restore) and performing page-level restores.

I started doing some serious database disaster recovery stuff in 2006 while working for Fujitsu Asia. As the only hard core SQL Server guy in a team of Wintel engineers, the buck stops with me when it comes to anything related to SQL Server. And since our main offerings all revolve around high availability and disaster recovery, I have to be very familiar and well versed with all possible recovery techniques that are available to the version of SQL Server that we are running. On top of that, I need to make sure that all our backup strategies meet a specific application platform’s recovery objectives and service level agreements.

Throughout the years, I have learned a handful of those database recovery techniques. I owe most of what I’ve learned on SQL Server database recovery from the husband-and-wife team of Paul Randal (Twitter | Blog) and Kimberly Tripp (Twitter | Blog) from SQLSkills. I’ve used some of these techniques on real life disasters from customer cases, demos for presentations at conferences that went really bad (I’ll save that for another blog post) and even just for trying something new. I’m fortunate and blessed enough to learn from the best and the brightest in the industry – the SQL Server Microsoft Certified Masters community and the SQL Server MVP community. And, there’s always something new to learn every day.

This video is one of the modules on my Udemy course SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Deep Dive.If you want to try them out for yourself, check out the following articles that I wrote related to this video – complete with sample scripts and screenshots. Don’t be thrown off by the fact that the titles say SQL Server 2005. The techniques and scripts still work and the video was recorded using SQL Server 2012.

• Disaster Recovery Procedures in SQL Server 2005
• Isolating Critical Objects for SQL Server Disaster Recovery Procedures
• SQL Server Partitioned Tables with Multiple Filegroups for High Availability
• Using Page Level Restore as a Disaster Recovery Procedure in SQL Server 2005

Have fun.