• Nice article.

    I have been called once by power users after they had started a batch with incorrect parameters, and another time when they started the batch accidentaly while they only wanted to inspect some results of the previous batch (due to a flaw in the user interface design). On both instances I was able to restore the database using a point in time recovery to just before the start of the batch. These batches are run after office hours so no user modifications were lost.

    I can tell you, most DBA's don't know about this possibility, but it can really save the day when a user initiated disaster strikes. At another client, we could not risk throwing work of other users away, but we could make a restore to another database and copy only the relevant data without affecting the integrity. It required soma support from the developers of the application to restore just enough, but I've seldom seen users so happy!

    Yes, point in time recovery is very very useful, especialy when you need to recover from errors caused by user initiated actions. Thank you, Microsoft, for putting that feature into SQL Server!