It’s almost inevitable that at some point every DBA will face dealing with corruption – so it’s very important that you know how the server will behave when corruption happens. You also need to make sure that whatever logic you’ve created to catch corruptions (either through error log parsing, alerts, or Agent jobs – topic for a future post) will actually work.

To do all this you need a corrupt database to play with. Earlier this year I created two corrupt databases – one for 2000 (attached in broken2000.zip) and one for 2005 (attached in broken2005.zip). The two attached files can be restored by unzipping them and then using the following syntax (substituting the correct backup name):

RESTORE DATABASE broken FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\brokenXXX.bck’

WITH MOVE ‘broken’ TO ‘c:\sqlskills\broken.mdf’,

MOVE ‘broken_log’ TO ‘c:\sqlskills\broken_log.ldf’;

GO

The databases have the same schema – a table called ‘brokentable’ (c1 int, c2 varchar(7000)) with one row in it. The table has a single data-page which I’ve corrupted differently in 2000 and 2005:

• 
  
  2000: The corrupt page has page ID (1:75) and the page header is corrupt so that selecting from the table will result in a 605 error which will kill the connection.
  
  
• 
  
  2005: The corrupt page has page ID (1:143) and the page header is corrupt such that the page checksum is bad.

A cautionary note on page checksums – if you upgrade a database from 2000 to 2005 and turn on page checksums, nothing happens! It’s not until a database page is read into the buffer pool, changed in some way and then written back out to disk that it will have a page checksum stamped on it. This means that once you turn them on, you need to trigger a page checksum being written to each page in some way – e.g. rebuilding all indexes or forcing an in-place update of all table rows. Neither of these is very palatable and there’s no tool to force page checksums in SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately there are no plans to include such a tool in SQL Server 2008 either.

Below I’ve listed a few things you can try out to see what would happen on your database if a checksum failed. These are all using the 2005 corrupt database.

Query errors

Any query that touches that page is going to fail with an 824 error. The IO errors in 2005 are different from 2000 – they’ve been split into 3:

• 
  
  823 – a hard IO error. This is where SQL Server has asked the OS to read the page but it just can’t.
  
  
• 
  
  824 – a soft IO error. This is where the OS could read the page but SQL Server decided that the page was corrupt – for example with a page checksum failure
  
  
• 
  
  825 – a read-retry error. This is where either an 823 or 824 occured, SQL server retried the IO automatically and it succeeded. This error is written to the errorlog only – you need to be aware of these as they’re a sign of your IO subsystem going awry. There’s no way to turn off read-retry and force SQL Server to ‘fail-fast’ – whether this behavior is a good or bad thing can be argued both ways – personally I don’t like it.

SELECT * FROM broken..brokentable;

GO

Msg 824, Level 24, State 2, Line 1

SQL Server detected a logical consistency-based I/O error: incorrect checksum (expected: 0x7232c940; actual: 0x720e4940). It occurred during a read of page (1:143) in database ID 8 at offset 0x0000000011e000 in file ‘c:\sqlskills\broken.mdf’. Additional messages in the SQL Server error log or system event log may provide more detail. This is a severe error condition that threatens database integrity and must be corrected immediately. Complete a full database consistency check (DBCC CHECKDB). This error can be caused by many factors; for more information, see SQL Server Books Online.

DBCC CHECKDB

CHECKDB throws us some nice errors. Note that it doesn’t actually mention a page checksum failure. CHECKDB is the only thing in SQL Server that can ‘eat’ IO errors and convert them into non-fatal corruption errors. Note in the CHECKDB output below that the repair level needed to repair this error is ‘repair_allow_data_loss’ – this is because the repair for a page with any kind of IO error on it is to delete the page, fix-up all relevant linkages, and rebuild any referencing indexes.

DBCC CHECKDB (‘broken’) WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS;

GO

Msg 8928, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Object ID 2073058421, index ID 0, partition ID 72057594038321152, alloc unit ID 72057594042318848 (type In-row data): Page (1:143) could not be processed. See other errors for details.

Msg 8939, Level 16, State 98, Line 1

Table error: Object ID 2073058421, index ID 0, partition ID 72057594038321152, alloc unit ID 72057594042318848 (type In-row data), page (1:143). Test (IS_OFF (BUF_IOERR, pBUF->bstat)) failed. Values are 12716041 and -4.

CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 2 consistency errors in table ‘brokentable’ (object ID 2073058421).

CHECKDB found 0 allocation errors and 2 consistency errors in database ‘broken’.

repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB (broken).

Backup with CHECKSUM

If you have page checksums turned on, you should always use the WITH CHECKSUM option when taking backups. This will cause the page checksums to be checked as they’re read into the backup. If a bad page checksum is found, the backup will stop and print a message identifying the bad page. Using the WITH CHECKSUM option on a backup will also generate a checksum over the entire backup stream and store it in the backup. This means we can detect a damaged backup by recalculating the checksum and comparing it against that stored in the backup – in much the same way that page checksums work.

BACKUP DATABASE broken TO DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’

WITH CHECKSUM;

GO

Msg 3043, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

BACKUP ‘broken’ detected an error on page (1:143) in file ‘c:\sqlskills\broken.mdf’.

Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

BACKUP DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

The backup has failed because of a bad page checksum. However, we can force it to backup. If this is the only copy of the database we have, and we’re being forced to run repair to fix a corruption, for instance, then we want to make sure we have a backup to restore from in case something goes wrong with the repair. Even a backup that contains a corrupt database is better than no backup at all. In this case, we can use the CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR option which will force the backup to continue when it finds a bad page.

BACKUP DATABASE broken TO DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’

WITH CHECKSUM, CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR;

GO

Processed 160 pages for database ‘broken’, file ‘broken’ on file 1.

Processed 1 pages for database ‘broken’, file ‘broken_log’ on file 1.

BACKUP WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR successfully generated a backup of the damaged database. Refer to the SQL Server error log for information about the errors that were encountered.

BACKUP DATABASE successfully processed 161 pages in 2.025 seconds (0.651 MB/sec).

RESTORE VERIFYONLY

You can check the high-level validity of any backup set using the RESTORE VERIFYONLY command.

RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2005.bck’;

GO

The backup set on file 1 is valid.

What about on the backup that we forced using CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR?

RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’;

GO

The backup set was written with damaged data by a BACKUP WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR.

Isn’t that cool? It tells us that the backup was already corrupt when it was written. Ok – let’s ask it to specifically check the checksums in the backup. This will look through all the pages in the backup that have page checksums, check them, and recalculate the backup stream checksum.

RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’

WITH CHECKSUM;

GO

The backup set was written with damaged data by a BACKUP WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR.

In our case, we get the same as above because the database was known to be corrupt when the backup was taken, so none of the checksum checking is done. What about if we try to check the checksums on the initial backup?

RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2005.bck’

WITH CHECKSUM;

GO

Msg 3187, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

RESTORE WITH CHECKSUM cannot be specified because the backup set does not contain checksum information.

Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

VERIFY DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

We can’t do that as the backup wasn’t taken using the WITH CHECKSUM option in the first place, even though some of the database pages may have page checksums on them.

RESTORE

How about we try to overwrite the existing ‘broken’ database with the one from the second backup we took?

RESTORE DATABASE broken FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’

WITH REPLACE;

GO

Msg 3183, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

RESTORE detected an error on page (1:143) in database “broken” as read from the backup set.

Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally.

It won’t let us because the backup contains corrupt data (and it knows that because we forced the backup to complete using the CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR option). However, there may be cases where you’ve lost your database and all you have is a corrupt backup. In this case it may be better to restore what data you do have rather than lose everything. You can do it using the CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR option on the RESTORE command this time:

RESTORE DATABASE broken FROM DISK=‘c:\sqlskills\broken2.bck’

WITH REPLACE, CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR;

GO

Processed 160 pages for database ‘broken’, file ‘broken’ on file 1.

Processed 1 pages for database ‘broken’, file ‘broken_log’ on file 1.

The backup set was written with damaged data by a BACKUP WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR.

RESTORE WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR was successful but some damage was encountered. Inconsistencies in the database are possible.

RESTORE DATABASE successfully processed 161 pages in 0.392 seconds (3.364 MB/sec).

Isn’t that cool? It works BUT it tells us that the backup set contained corrupt data and that the database was restored but could have corrupt data in.

Summary

Have a play about with these databases to familiarize yourself with the kind of responses you’ll get from the various tools when a corruption exists, and how to work around it if need be.

Let me know if you want to see any particular kinds of corruptions explored, or want a database with something specific corrupted in.