SQLBits 2023

A DBA's Guide to the Proper Handling of Corruption

Corruption can strike at any time. As DBAs how we alert, investigate, and respond can have a profound impact on our company. In this session we will learn how to detect and respond to corruption when it strikes.
Corruption can strike at any time. As DBAs how we alert, investigate, and respond can have a profound impact on our company. In this session we will learn how to detect and respond to various types of corruption.

First we will be focus on ways to detect corruption early. This will include understanding tools available to us like DBCC CheckDB as well as the importance of testing your backups. We’ll look at some sample scripts to automate corruption checks and common alerts we should have set up on our instances.

Then we will move onto how to respond. We’ll discuss the importance of incident management and the Disaster Recovery mindset and look at how we can analyze the situation safely as well as point out various pitfalls that trip people up. We’ll also discuss when and how we may be able to fix corruption vs restoring the database. Additionally we will look at a few common examples of corruption and how to fix them.