Sunday, November 8, 2009

Consistency checking for a 1.2 TB database

I would like to share with you my recent experience on how to build consistency checking for VLDB by using DBCC CHECKDB/CHECKTABLE and etc. I was following Paul's great article
http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/CHECKDB-From-Every-Angle-Consistency-Checking-Options-for-a-VLDB.aspx
to build the same or almost the same strategy on the client's site. They have 8 huge tables arround 658,245,225 pages each table and I tested the bigest one to run DBCC CHECKTABLE command. It took 17 hours to complete the task but unfortunately it was not acceptable for the client. So my final solution is (thanks to Paul) to restore the database on the dev.machine and perform the checking on.