GilaMonster (4/20/2015)
andrew gothard (4/20/2015)
Not that I've ever tried it, but I'd expect snapshotting an active 2Tb database could take a real bite out of my maintenance window.Shouldn't do. If there are long running transactions maybe, those have to be rolled back in the context of the snapshot, but otherwise no. As I mentioned, CheckDB already takes a database snapshot to run against, I don't know if it includes all filegroups or leaves out read only ones, not something I've investigated.
Since you have filegroups and partitions, have you considered doing partial restores to a secondary server and checkDB that? If you're already backing up at the filegroup level then that should fit well into the routine. You'll still need to do the DBCC CheckCatalog on the full database, but that's a rather fast part of CheckDB
It's worth considering. We are going to have a standby on our other site for HA, but we'd need to talk to our licencing bod to see if that would mean licencing that too. I find it unlikely - I mean who wouldn't check a critical component of a core system. Some colleagues are unconvinced.
I'm a DBA.
I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.