Restoring Individual Pages
The ability to restore pages has been
available since SQL Server 2005; however, up until now, you needed to
use T-SQL code. In this release you can perform this type of restore
through a native interface inside Management Studio.
What exactly does restoring a page allow you to
do? You can restore one or more damaged pages without having to restore
the entire database. Database pages that are suspect are specifically
identified in the dbo.suspect_pages table inside the msdb system database.
To restore a page, select the database you want
to restore the page to. From the context or Action menu, select Tasks ?
Restore ? Page to open the SQL Server Restore page form. The Restore
page is shown in Figure 4.
In the section marked Pages, SQL Server lists the
pages identified as suspect in your selected database. If you want to
run another check to make sure the suspected pages list is up to date,
click the Check Database Pages button. This initiates a DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICAL_ONLY check and then re-queries the msdb.dbo.suspect_pages table for any additional rows pertaining to your database.
In the Tail Log section, specify the location
where you want the tail-log backup of the database stored. This is
required because the restore process automatically initiates a tail-log
backup. The default location selected is the default backup location
for SQL Server. If you want to change this, click the Ellipsis button,
and specify the new location.
The database's backup chain is automatically
loaded into the backup sets window. This is needed because the
transaction log backups must be applied to all files that contain a
page that is being recovered. If no existing transaction log backups
exist, it uses the last full backup along with the latest differential
backup, if there are any. It automatically adds the new tail-log backup
that is created during this process. Clicking the Verify button
performs a RESTORE WITH VERIFYONLY against the backup set to ensure that the backups are valid and readable.
After you verify that all options are
valid, click OK. This initiates the restore process. You can see the
progress of this activity at the top of the Restore Page window. When
it is complete you see a pop-up message stating “Database ‘<database
name>’ Restored Successfully”.
