{"id":4984,"date":"2019-04-18T14:29:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T21:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3.209.169.194\/blogs\/paul\/?p=4984"},"modified":"2019-04-18T14:29:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T21:29:50","slug":"the-curious-case-of-how-to-find-filestream-info-from-an-mdf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/the-curious-case-of-how-to-find-filestream-info-from-an-mdf\/","title":{"rendered":"The Curious Case of… how to find FILESTREAM info from an MDF"},"content":{"rendered":"

(The Curious Case of\u2026<\/em>\u00a0used to be part of our bi-weekly\u00a0newsletter<\/a>\u00a0but we decided to make it a\u00a0regular blog post instead so it can sometimes be more frequent. It covers something interesting one of us encountered when working with a client, doing some testing, or were asked in a random question from the community.)<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago a question came in to the MCM email distribution list where someone wanted to know how to find FILESTREAM info from an MDF. They were working with a client who needed to attach a database and all they had was the MDF – no backup, and no access to the database attached anywhere else. The attach was failing because the database had a FILESTREAM filegroup defined, and so the\u00a0CREATE DATABASE … FOR ATTACH<\/em> statement needed to specify the FILESTREAM filegroup name and a new location for it.<\/p>\n

Given that there was no SQL Server access to the database or a backup, the only way to find the information was through examining the MDF directly.<\/p>\n

Here are the steps I recommended:<\/p>\n