Chapter 8. Page restores
It’s said that taking and verifying backups is a DBA’s first responsibility, but I believe that the most important thing is the ability to restore data when necessary, in as short a time as possible. That ability requires real knowledge and practical experience of effectively using the restore command, as well as the less commonly used page restore feature.
There are several possible granularities at which a database can be fully or partially restored. I suspect that everyone is familiar with the full restore, a replacement of the entire database with whatever was in the backup, but that’s far from the only option you have.
The database can also be restored at a filegroup level if filegroups other than the primary one exist. It can also be restored at a file level, if there are multiple data files in the database. Such a restore can be used either to replace the database and bring it up piece by piece, or to replace a damaged file or filegroup while leaving the rest of the database intact. Additionally, it can be used to perform partial restores of the database to an alternate location. Complete coverage of these operations, known as piecemeal and partial restores, is beyond the scope of this chapter.
