Hideously Dangerous Techniques you wont find a KB article on (I)

Although I hope it does not happen in your practice, you may someday find yourself with a SQL Server database stuck in the 'recovering' state.


If it is a large database, say, a terabyte or so, recovery may take fifteen or sixteen hours.


This may be problematic to the ongoing operations that you are responsible for.


Here is an ugly, ugly hack that will let you bypass the recovery checks.   It carries some risk.   It is dependent on you having a good backup of the recovering database.    It is dependent on you having a good backup of the recovering database.


This operation requires an instance stop. 


1.   Stop the impacted instance.
2.  Rename the .mdf/.ldf/.ndf files for the database stuck in 'recovery.'
3.  This will cause all sorts of unpleasantness.  Expect it.
4.  Start the instance.    Note the database is now 'suspect.'
5.  Restore your good backup to a different name.
6.  Delete the suspect database.
7.  Rename the restore to the correct name.
8.  Conduct a forensics analysis of the process that led to the failure.
9.  Write profligate emails of apology.
10.  Avoid this process in the future.


This emerged in my own practice during a deployment, time-critical, of course.   High-dollar consultants were sidelined while the operation was in progress.   Developers were frustrated.


It was the result, of course, of hurrying and not thinking a large-scale ALTER COLUMN all the way through.


Here is a beautiful song to soothe your anxiety after reading about such hackwork.


If you botch this process, feel free to call Microsoft for support.   You will enjoy their dry, unamused chuckles and inability to help you.

Tough Week

Prepping for a deployment this week.   Ruined my good cutting board, burned my feet.

A Bitterness 
Mary Oliver

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.



Stephen Fry's excellent monologue seeded some meditations.

I have found, in the most bitter and angry parts of myself, a hideous expectation.

The wailing of a child, 'BUT YOU SAID LIFE WAS FAIR!,' a delusional and egocentric need.

I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with hope. To hope is to begin the process of disappointment.

A poet I am misquoting noted that Bitterness is really a sense of being cheated, of not being given one's due.

Envy and resentment grow well in the shade there.

It destroys gratitude in this sense- it is impossible to see blessings, focused on absences.

How deeply disappointed I have become.