Restoring a SQL Server database from a backup is easy to accomplish in the SQL Server IDE. Well, sometimes. In the real world, I often need to restore a development database, but the restore fails because I cannot gain exclusive access to the database. Some developers will detach the database and reattach it to grab exclusive access. If there are processes running frequently against the database, that may not work. Neither will killing all connections always work. The solution I’ve found is a short snippet of SQL to grab exclusive access, do the restore and then restore multi-user access. It looks like this:

USE master — Must be connected to a different database

-- Get exclusive access
ALTER DATABASE XXXXXX_Stage  SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;

-- Restore from disk
-- Note WITH REPLACE http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178615.aspx

RESTORE DATABASE XXXXXX_Stage  FROM DISK = 'F:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\XXXXXX_Stage _20100505.bak' WITH REPLACE

-- Restore multi user access
ALTER DATABASE XXXXXX_Stage SET MULTI_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;

Note the WITH ROLLBACK clauses. You should take a production database down and make sure all transactions have completed. Then do a restore through the IDE. If you use the code above, you may lose some transactions or logs. This usually doesn’t matter in a test environment.

Have fun!

Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQL,Code Sample,Database,Server,backup

Technorati Tags: Code, Code Sample, Database, SQL, SQL Server