Database corruption and inaccessibility of MDF files are serious issues faced by SQL administrators. Such corruption errors can affect business operations and even lead to revenue loss and reputation damage. Thus, it becomes crucial to resolving these errors to save your data.
In this article, we will discuss the reasons behind SQL database corruption and how you can resolve these errors with common ways to repair MDF files.
MDF files of SQL database are prone to many corruption errors. And there can be many reasons for the corruption of MDF files, such as hardware faults, issues with disks, subsystems, drivers, controllers, CPU, or memory module. Some of the major reasons behind the MDF file errors are:
When the MDF file becomes corrupt, it makes the SQL database inaccessible.
Besides, users also face a variety of error messages when the MDF gets corrupt.
Some of the common error messages displayed when the MDF files are corrupt include:
These errors need to be resolved as soon as possible; else it could lead to major corruption errors.
It is quiet easy to repair the damaged MDF files. You can either chose to restore the MDF files from the last backup that your system had carried out or chose to execute the inbuilt DBCC CHECKDB command. Though it is easy to restore data from backup, backups may not be up-to-date always. So, it is always recommended to fix the corruption issues using DBCC CHECKDB command. And if the repair process is not a complete success, one can rely on professional MDF recovery tools too. We will discuss both the methods here.
DBCC commands or Database Console Commands (in Transact-SQL) help to check the physical and logical consistency of a Microsoft SQL Server database, and also to fix existing issues. The DBCC CHECKDB command performs functions of three commands, namely DBCC CHECKALLOC, DBCC CHECKCATALOG and DBCC CHECKTABLE, thus avoiding the need to run these commands one by one.
The DBCC CHECKALLOC command is used to check disk space allocation structures for a database, and the DBCC CHECKTABLE to check the integrity of the pages and the structures that build indexed view or tables; the third of these DBCC CHECKCATALOG is used to check the consistency of an online database. The DBCC CHECKDB thus helps in fixing all SQL database consistency issues. For this, run the command in following syntax:
DBCC CHECKDB
[ ( database_name | database_id | 0
[ , NOINDEX
| , { REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS | REPAIR_FAST | REPAIR_REBUILD } ]
) ]
[ WITH
{
[ ALL_ERRORMSGS ]
[ , EXTENDED_LOGICAL_CHECKS ]
[ , NO_INFOMSGS ]
[ , TABLOCK ]
[ , ESTIMATEONLY ]
[ , { PHYSICAL_ONLY | DATA_PURITY } ]
[ , MAXDOP = number_of_processors ]
}
]
]
If the above method is not pretty helpful in resolving the errors or repairing the corrupt MDF files, then you should opt for an automated solution that can repair SQL database files quickly.
Kernel for SQL Database Recovery a simple alternative to the manual solution for repairing MDF/NDF files. It can quickly recover every object of an MDF/NDF file. Also, it offers a smooth working process, which makes it easier for every user to use the tool. To know better, look at the working process of this tool:
This way you can easily recover the corrupt MDF/NDF files without going through the hassles of the manual method.
Repairing MDF files is very crucial to protect your SQL database, but when the corruption is severe, it becomes a little complicated to resolve the error with manual approaches. In this article, we not only mentioned the reasons behind the MDF corruption but also talked about the best solutions that can be used to repair the MDF files.