At Soaring Eagle, we know that all organizations use databases for nearly every operation, ranging from CRM to sales and marketing. Therefore, when there is a failure in the database, the company risks losing mission-critical data that can cost the entire business.
There are generally three common causes of database failure. Let’s look at each one of them to determine how to recover your lost data.
1. File Corruption
If one or more files in the database are damaged, they can cause the database to fail at the file level, causing corruption. Files can be corrupted due to several reasons. Primary files, which can corrupt the entire database, may be corrupted due to changes in the SQL Server account, accidental data deletion, and file header corruption, among others.
In the case of Secondary File corruption, SQL database becomes inaccessible. If you try to access the corrupt database, you might get different error messages, such as Msg 823 error in SQL Server / Msg 824 in SQL Server / Msg 825 (read retry).
There are few solutions to repair a corrupt database, but they do not guarantee the complete recovery of the data.
You can use the log files to restore the database. However, log files are not enough to recover the database in many corruption cases, as some backup files also get corrupted if the corruption is critical.
Another way to repair the corrupt database is by using the database console commands, such as DBCC CHECKDB and DBCC DEBREPAIR. They can be helpful to fix minor database corruption issues, but they aren’t efficient though for all corruption cases.
2. File System Damage
If a server or computer is shut down incorrectly, or if it experiences a power surge, or something happens that interrupts the process while data is being written to the files, the files of the operating system can be damaged or corrupted.
After the incident, we recommend repairing or at least checking the filesystem to prevent future data loss.
In order to mount or modify a filesystem, sometimes a repair is required. Even if a check does not report any damage, the filesystem might still need a repair.
3. Software and Hardware Failure
Hardware failures may include memory errors, disk crashes, bad disk sectors, and disk full of errors among others. Hardware failures can also be attributed to design errors, inadequate or poor quality control during fabrication, overloading (use of under-capacity components) and wear out of mechanical parts. On the other hand, software failures may include failures related to software such as operating system, DBMS software, application programs and so on.
No matter how reliable your database management system seems, it cannot assure a failure-free transaction every time. To prevent any type of database failure, a free database consultation is a logical first step. By analyzing the health of your database, you can avoid issues down the line.
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