Welcome to the seventh week of 10 in the Database Corruption Challenge (DBCC), this is an about weekly competition. Here is how it works; I have created a corrupt database, hopefully more corrupt or more interesting than the previous week. I then solved the corruption myself in order to prove that it is possible to fix, without data loss.

New Participants

For any first time participants in Week 7, you can be part of a special prize group. I realize for those who are joining the competition now it isn’t possible to score enough points to compete with the current leaders. I will post a separate 3 week leader board for the last 3 weeks of the competition. To be considered in this section, you need to meet the following criteria:

You have not competed in the Database Corruption Challenge in past week

You must be subscribed to my newsletter so that you can get updated on the upcoming challenges.

You must participate in the remaining challenges (7, 8, 9 and 10). You don’t have to succeed in all of the remaining weeks, but you do need to try.

The Challenge

The challenge will be to download the corrupt or somehow damaged database and attempt to recover it. If you can recover it, please send me the steps you used to recover the database, along with some proof that the database has been recovered. The goal each week will be the following:

Recover the database to your best ability.

You need to be able to bring the database online and run queries against it.

For any corruption that causes data loss, you need to figure out how to restore as much of the missing data with what you have been given.

When you come up with your solution, send me your result by email. Tell me what you did to fix the corruption, what you did to restore data (if that as needed), and include proof. The proof could be a screen shot, showing the solution, it could be a TSQL Script with the solution, or something else. I will validate and confirm if your result is correct. Depending on the number of people who send me results, this may take a while.

The first person who sends me a correct result will get their name posted on my blog as the winner of this weeks DataBase Corruption Challenge (DBCC). Others who send me a correct solution by the deadline will also get their name posted. Some of the first, accurate and unique solutions will be posted on the resulting blog post. If you don’t wish to have your name associated with your results, please ask to remain anonymous, and I will not use your name. Unless you specify otherwise, anything you send me may be used on the blog to tell the story of how to solve the corruption.

Lets get started with the Challenge 7 Details. (click here).

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