A (Senior) Microsoft PSS specialist trying to perform an emergency data repair If you use it on a production server you are either:ġ. Bear in mind – this command is undocumented for a reason – it is extremely dangerous. My preferred approach is to to use the undocumented DBCC WRITEPAGE command. There are several ways to corrupt an SQL Server data file, including using a hex editor or low level file utility to open the file and slot in some jibberish.

Ideally we would like to be able to give these scenarios a run through in a more leisurely a relaxed environment! In this post I’m going to show you how to deliberately corrupt a test database so that you can get an understanding of how SQL Server will behave and so that you can run through your recovery process before it happens for real. The problem many DBA’s have is that their first exposure to these features is often when the corruption is happening for real. SQL Server has a range of features that are used to detect, repair and recover from data corruption in a data file. Following these instructions incorrectly could severely damage either a single database or an entire SQL Server instance

Warning: Do not carry out any of the instructions in this post anywhere near a production server or even a development server with valuable databases on it.

Sql repair master database