Proving the Restore, Part 2: HEADERONLY Changes Shape Between Versions
In I used msdb to find a database whose newest full backup had aged past a week. msdb tells you a backup happened. It doesn’t tell you the file is still readable, or which database…
Proving the Restore, Part 1: The Backup Job Said Success
A maintenance window rebooted a server in the middle of its weekly full backup. The job was killed mid-write, the partial file was discarded, and the next scheduled run was seven days out. Differentials kept…
Acronyms, Collisions, and the Cost of Not Asking
I promised a follow-up to a post about tech vocabulary,[1] and this is it. That one argued that dramatic words and vague words fail the same way: they carry attitude where information should be. I…
Forwarded Records: the Back-Pointer and the Trip Home
Note: a self-contained MCVE reproducing every result in this post is included at the end – see "The MCVE: run it yourself". Hugo Kornelis recently challenged a sentence in my post on how SQL Server…
The Blast Radius Was Four Rows
A while back I read an incident report that described the “blast radius” of a “catastrophic” data issue. I kept reading, looking for the part where something exploded. The actual damage: four rows in a…