Home Forums Article Discussions Article Discussions by Author Discuss content posted by Paul Randal Memory Corruptions, or Why You Need DBCC CHECKDB RE: Memory Corruptions, or Why You Need DBCC CHECKDB

  • November 8, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    #1557329

    Paul Randal (11/8/2012)

    Michael Meierruth (11/8/2012)

    After reading your recent 'Importance of Validating Backups' and now this article on DBCC CHECKSUM, I'm very curious to know how much database corruption is really encountered in the real world. I deal with a few client production databases and in the course of 10 years or so I have never run into this corruption issue - thank heaven.

    So to all the SQL Server Central community out there, to whom has this ever really happend!?

    Hundreds to thousands of times every week across the world, in the tens of millions of SQL Server databases out there. Just look at the corruption forums here. I get random emails from people at least 5 times a week asking for help with interpreting DBCC CHECKDB results, and I've been directly involved (at Microsoft, on forums, with clients, emails etc) with several thousand cases of corruption over the last 12 years.

    Thanks

    So in those several thousand cases what do you see as the main cause of these corruptions. It's ovbiously something bad at the hardware level. But what I'm looking for is things like 'having bought cheap hardware', 'not changing hardware often enough', 'bad physical environments', 'plain bad luck' i.e. 'philosophical' things like that.