Rollback Update Operation in SQL Server - sql-server

I executed an UPDATE operation for every row in my table by mistake. Is there any way I can take this back? I use SQL Server 2005.

I recently ran into same situation but latter used this third party tool and it worked !
http://www.apexsql.com/sql_tools_log.aspx
Read this thread it might help
And..
If you have already executed the update query and want to roll back,your only real option is to restore a database backup.
If you are using Full backups, then you should be able to restore the database to a specific point in time.

Related

Rollback updated data in sql server table without using transaction

I have updated all of the rows of a sql server table by mistake.
Since this was not part of a transaction I can't rollback, how can I revert it?
Stop new updates to the database.
Take a full backup to a new backup file.
Now take a transactional backup to a new file.
Now do a point in time restore. Choose the time before your accident.
You will lose all other events that happened since then.
If this is a production database then you should do a point in time restore to a new database then use an update statement to correct your incorrect data.
Good luck, stay calm.

Replicating a SQL Server database for read access

I have an application that is in production with its own database for more than 10 years.
I'm currently developing a new application (kind of a reporting application) that only needs read access to the database.
In order not to be too much linked to the database and to be able to use newer DAL (Entity Framework 6 Code First) I decided to start from a new empty database, and I only added the tables and columns I need (different names than the production one).
Now I need some way to update the new database with the production database regularly (would be best if it is -almost- immediate).
I hesitated to ask this question on http://dba.stackexchange.com but I'm not necessarily limited to only using SQL Server for the job (I can develop and run some custom application if needed).
I already made some searches and had those (part-of) solutions :
Using Transactional Replication to create a smaller database (with only the tables/columns I need). But as far as I can see, the fact that I have different table names / columns names will be problematic. So I can use it to create a smaller database that is automatically replicated by SQL Server, but I would still need to replicate this database to my new one (it may avoid my production database to be too much stressed?)
Using triggers to insert/update/delete the rows
Creating some custom job (either a SQL Job or some Windows Service that runs every X minutes) that updates the necessary tables (I have a LastEditDate that is updated by a trigger on my tables, so I can know that a row has been updated since my last replication)
Do you some advice or maybe some other solutions that I didn't foresee?
Thanks
I think that the Transactional replication is the better than using triggers.
Too much resources would be used in source server/database due to the trigger fires by each DML transaction.
Transactional rep could be scheduled as a SQL job and run it few times a day/night or as a part of nightly scheduled job. IT really depends on how busy the source db is...
There is one more thing that you could try - DB mirroring. it depends on your sql server version.
If it were me, I'd use transactional replication, but keep the table/column names the same. If you have some real reason why you need them to change (I honestly can't think of any good ones and a lot of bad ones), wrap each table in a view. At least that way, the view is the documentation of where the data is coming from.
I'm gonna throw this out there and say that I'd use Transaction Log shipping. You can even set the secondary DBs to read-only. There would be some setting up for full recovery mode and transaction log backups but that way you can just automatically restore the transaction logs to the secondary database and be hands-off with it and the secondary database would be as current as your last transaction log backup.
Depending on how current the data needs to be, if you only need it done daily you can set up something that will take your daily backups and then just restore them to the secondary.
In the end, we went for the Trigger solution. We don't have that much changes a day (maybe 500, 1000 top), and it didn't put too much pressure on the current database. Thanks for your advices.

Using SAVE TRANSACTION with a linked server

Inside a transaction that have a savepoint I have to make a join with a table that is in a linked server. When I try to do it, I get the error message:
“Cannot use SAVE TRANSACTION within a distributed transaction”
The remote table data rarely changes. It is almost fixed. Is is possible to tell SqlServer to exclude this table from the transaction? I've tried a (NOLOCK) hint, but it isn't possible to use this hint for a table in a linked server.
Does anyone knows about a workaround? I'm using the ole SqlServer 2000.
One thing that you could do is to make a local copy of the remote table before you start the transaction. I know that this may sound like a lot of overhead, but remote joins are frequently a performance problem anyway and the SOP fix for that is also to make a local copy.
According to this link, the ability to use SAVEPOINTs in a Distributed transaction was dropped in SQL 7.
To allow application migration from Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 when
savepoints inside distributed transactions are in use, Microsoft SQL
Server 2000 Service Pack 1 introduces a trace flag that allows a
savepoint within a distributed transaction. The trace flag is 8599 and
can be turned on during the SQL Server startup or within an individual
session (that is, prior to enabling a distributed transaction with a
BEGIN DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION statement) by using the DBCC TRACEON
command. When trace flag 8599 is set to ON, SQL Server allows you to
use a savepoint within a distributed transaction.
So unfortunately, you may either have to drop the bounding ACID transaction, or change the SPROC on the remote server so that it doesn't use SAVEPOINTs.
On a side note (Although I have seen that you have tagged it SQL SERVER 2000) but to make a point that SQL SERVER 2008 has remote proc trans Option for this.
In this case if the distributed table is not too large I would copy it to a temp table. If possible, include any filtering to get the number of rows to a minimum. Then you can proceed normally. Another option since the data changes rarely is copy the data to a permanant table and checking if anything has changed to prevent sending to much data over the network every time you run the transaction. You could only pull over the recent changes.
If you wish to handle transaction from UI level and you have Visual Studio 2008/.net fx 3.5 or + framework then you can wrap your logic with TransactionScope Class. If you dont have any frontends and you are working only on Sql Servers kindly ignore my answer...

Best Way to Create Nightly Replication of Sql Server Database

I want to create a job that runs every night. I have a database (MyDatabase) that I want to copy/replace my staging database with (MyDatabase_Stage).
I presume the easiest way is to do something related to SQL Server Agent, but I have never done anything like this before. What is the best practice and easiest route to go to get this setup and tested?
I do not care if the data is 24 hours old and the most important criteria is that is does a full copy every night at the same time.
copy the .bak file to your staging server and restore from there using a script.
Run the script on a schedule in an agent job.
The benefit of a script is that you can add functionality later - for instance you might not require audit tables and these can be truncated.
Check out snapshot replication. As part of the setup, it'll create a SQL Agent job to do the copy of the data and whatnot. You can then schedule that job at whatever time and frequency you like.

SQL Server UNDO

I am a part time developer (full time student) and the company I am working for uses SQL Server 2005. The thing I find strange about SQL Server that if you do a script that involves inserting, updating etc there isn't any real way to undo it except for a rollback or using transactions.
You might say what's wrong with those 2 options? Well if for example someone does an update statement and forgets to put in a WHERE clause, you suddenly find yourself with 13k rows updated and suddenly all the clients in that table are named 'bob'. Now you have the wrath of 13k bobs to face since that "someone" forgot to use a transaction and if you do a rollback you are going to undo critical changes that were needed in other fields.
In my studies I have Oracle. In Oracle you can first run the script then commit it if you find that there isn't any mistakes. I was wondering if there was something that I missed in SQL Server since I am still relatively new in working developer world.
I don't believe you missed anything. Using transactions to prevent against these kind of errors is the best mechanism and it is the same mechanism Oracle uses to protected the end user. The difference is that Oracle implicitly begins a transaction for you whereas in SQL Server you must do it explicitly.
SET IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS is what you are probably looking for.
I'm no database/sql server expert and I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but there is the possibility to create snapshots of a database. A snapshot allows you to revert the database to that state at any time.
Check this link for more information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175158.aspx
I think transactions work well. You could rollback the DB (to a previous backup or point in the log), but I think transactions are much simpler.
How about this: never make changes to a production database that have not 1st been tested on your development server, and always make a backup before trying anything that is un-proven.
From what I understand, SQL Server 2008 added an Auditing feature that logs all changes made by users to the various databases and also has the option to roll them back after the fact.
Again, this is from what I've read or overheard from our DBA, but might be worth looking into.
EDIT: After looking into it, it appears to only give the ability to rollback on schema changes, not data modifications (DDL triggers).
If I am doing something with any risk in SQL Server, I write the script like this:
BEGIN TRAN
Insert .... whatever
Update .... whatever
-- COMMIT
The last line is a comment on purpose: I first run the lines before, then make sure there's no error, and then highlight just the word Commit and execute that. This works because in Management Studio you can select a part of the T-SQL and just execute the selected portion.
There are a couple of advantages: Implicit Transactions works too, but it's not the default for SQL Server so you have to remember to turn it on or set options to do that. Also, if it's on all the time, I find it's easy for people to "forget" and leave uncommitted transactions open, which can block others. That's mainly because it's not the default behavior and SQL Server folks aren't used to it.

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