Day 8 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery (T-SQL Tuesday #38): Resolutions for All DBAs

This post is not only day 7 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series, it is also participating in T-SQL Tuesday #38 hosted this month by Jason Brimhall (blog|@sqlrnnr). The theme for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is resolutions or resolving or just being resolute. For my part in this monthly blogfest, I am going to list some disaster recovery resolutions that I think every DBA should make.

If you missed any of the earlier posts in my DR series, you can check them out here:

31 Days of disaster Recovery
1. Does DBCC Automatically Use Existing Snapshot?
2. Protection From Restoring a Backup of a Contained Database
3. Determining Files to Restore Database
4. Back That Thang Up
5. Dealing With Corruption in a Nonclustered Index
6. Dealing With Corruption in Allocation Pages
7. Writing SLAs for Disaster Recover

Disaster Recovery Resolutions

• Ensure that every database is being backed up.
• Prioritize backups. Investigate backup failures as a top priority.
• Verify that all of your databases are using the checksum page verification option.

  Select name, page_verify_option_desc
  From sys.databases;

• Use the WITH CHECKSUM option for all database backups and restores
  • See: Use All the Checksums.
• Test your backups. Preferably, automate restoring them to a different server.
• Test your recovery plan. Anyone who might need to implement should test regularly with different scenarios.
• Create alerts and send notifications for the following errors:
  • 823 – Error reading page at the OS level.
  • 824 – Error reading page at the SQL Server level.
  • 825 – Error reading page but was successful on retry.
  • 829 – Page has been marked as restore pending.
  • Blog post to follow explaining why.