Database - Selective Backup

rexehuk · 27 Jul 2011 at 10:43

Hello all,

We had a database sent off on Friday for some editing, we got it back Monday and all was well...

Now 2 days in I found a massive error regarding some of our sites being in the DB twice (all of the new ones are empty records).

I have done a ton of work on Monday/Today and now they wish to revert the DB back to thursday... I asked why can they not backup the affected tables I've been editing (not linked to the updated ones afaik), he then responded "you can't".

They are running SQL Server 2000, I'm pretty sure that with some time it can be done... just IT being lazy?

What do you think?

Pho · 27 Jul 2011 at 12:12

You can back them up and restore them, but depending on primary keys etc and how much it has changed it could be a pain to do manually.

What you could do is download trials of both SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare from Redgate and then compare a backup made prior to restoring to the restored version (or compare the current version to a backup.. either way) and generate a change script to reinsert/update/delete the bad schema/data for whichever tables you want.

rexehuk · 27 Jul 2011 at 12:38

Cheers Pho, this is for a public sector org... I really dislike their "Can't do it" attitude.

I think they've rushed through and nuked the DB now... restored it to Thursday. I think we shall be billing the company who done the work though, no deployment testing... nothing. They had our ENTIRE DB to test with, so not like they didn't have a working environment to run on.

Pho · 27 Jul 2011 at 13:27

Sounds fun for you then!

Do you not have any kind of automated backups of the database which you can grab and then compare to the live database? I'm not a dba (although I end up being one

) yet I'd always make sure I had a backup before nuking days worth of data "just incase".

Did you hand out your entire database to someone else, for them to make some changes on and then restore it back to your own systems? Someone should have been taking a backup before that restoration.

rexehuk · 27 Jul 2011 at 13:59

Pho said:
Sounds fun for you then!

Do you not have any kind of automated backups of the database which you can grab and then compare to the live database? I'm not a dba (although I end up being one ) yet I'd always make sure I had a backup before nuking days worth of data "just incase".

Did you hand out your entire database to someone else, for them to make some changes on and then restore it back to your own systems? Someone should have been taking a backup before that restoration.

Well we backed up the system Friday evening then sent it off to the software developers (who make the frontend the DB sits on) to install some new features.

They sent it back with a totally different naming systems for thousands of sites (graves), so we now have thousands of duplicate graves with no one in them tied into the mapping... instead of OUR graves tied into the mapping.

We got it restored on Monday with their new backend installed, all looked well so we ploughed on and began data entry again on tuesday... Due to the issue I found they've rolled it back to Thursday, not sure if they took a backup of todays though.

Not sure it's worth the fight now... only person who knows / can argue the situation is me as no one else has a clue here

. Must escape to the private sector ASAP!