The Apprentice: Intro to Troubleshooting

Just for kicks (and because I hadn’t prepared my intro to Indexes…), I broke The Apprentice’s database (dbname MoreCake if you are following along) when he wasn’t looking.

I had told him I was going to break something, just to watch him try to sort it out, so he knew it was coming.

Before we got started, I changed the name of the data file from MoreCake.mdf to MoreCake .mdf.

His steps:

  • Start SQL Services…notice it come up fine
  • Notice MoreCake came up “Recovery Pending”
  • Verify Restore is an option
  • Take offline
  • Try to bring online
  • Read error message after online failure (OS error 2, file not found)
  • Look in Windows Explorer, squint, remove space
  • Refresh database and smirk at me.

Elapsed time from start services to smirk?  3 minutes.

Me: Jaw on ground.

If you add it all together and are generous, he has maybe 4 days of training including videos.

I know some DBAs that would never have noticed the extra space.

3 minutes.

We went on to look at ERRORLOGs, talk about what is contained in the master database, and a little bit of creating a database with a bunch of records to start off Index training in our next session.

And then I deleted MoreCake along with all Backup and Restore history when he went to grab a soda.  Still GUI, and with no backup history to populate it he figured out to go to devices and browse for the most recent .bak file.

3 minutes.   Smart dude.

Thanks,

Kevin3NF

 

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