Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 5: Restore Sequences and the STOPAT Rewind
The first four parts of this series were about taking backups. This one is about the operation they all exist for. A restore sequence is a small program you write under pressure, and its grammar…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 4: Copy-Only Backups, the Chain-Safe Snapshot
ended with a rule: one tool owns log backups, and everything else takes COPY_ONLY. This part explains what copy-only backups actually change, proves it from msdb, and then builds the pattern that makes them genuinely…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 3: The Log Chain and How People Break It
showed that log backups form a linked list: each backup’s first_lsn equals the previous backup’s last_lsn. Point-in-time restore works by walking that list. Break one link and every log backup after the break is useless…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 2: Anatomy of a Backup
A backup file is not a copy of your MDF. It is a container with a precise contract: enough pages and enough log to reconstruct a transactionally consistent database as of the moment the backup…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 1: Recovery Models Actually Explained
Every SQL Server database has a recovery model, and most databases got theirs by inheritance rather than by decision: whatever model had at CREATE DATABASE time is what you are running today. That default determines…
Copilot Code Review and the 4,000 Character Limit
Here is a fun way to lose an afternoon: carefully write coding standards into your repository’s .github/copilot-instructions.md, request a Copilot code review on a pull request that violates several of them, and watch the review…